Let it flow: If fresh beer is what you crave, how about brewing it at home?

In case you don't see yourself in long, snaking queues outside overwhelmed wine shops for craft beer that you might not find there, the only option is to brew your own. And no, it's not called hooch.

Rahul Singh, founder and CEO of Beer Café, has about one lakh litres of beer lying across 40 outlets in the country. Cases upon cases of beer in 70 different flavour profiles sourced from all over the word— a Beer Café specialty. But at home, he doesn’t have a single pint to drink. If that’s not a cruel irony, I don’t know what is.

A beer bottle has a shelf life of six to 12 months depending on its variety. Ales spoil first, lagers follow. “I’d rather give the beer away for free than have to dump it,” says Singh. He has petitioned the government to allow him to sell his beer through a takeaway or a drive-through model, something similar to how Starbucks plans to sell its coffee. “It’s a Rs 3-crore inventory,” says Singh. But I think we can all agree that the mildly viscous, highly palatable and distinctly flavourful bubbly liquid is more precious than that. And at MRP, an Erdinger Dunkel (German, wheat) would be cheaper than a Hazelnut Frappe (frothy, sweet) at Starbucks.

Microbreweries have it worse. Behind their shutters are tanks full of freshly brewed beer that no one is ordering anymore. It’s chilled at precisely 4-degree Celsius to keep fresh. But brewers can’t keep expending electricity on beer that may never get sold. An estimated eight lakh litres of craft beer from 250 microbreweries in the country are at the end of their short lives. The custodians of the craft, the master brewers, are dangerously close to pulling the plug on their babies, unless a solution is found.

Like a lot of breweries are doing in the US, the Indian brewers have asked the government to allow them to package and sell their beer in growlers. But in the absence of pasteurising and bottling, and also labeling and MRP, it seems an uphill task.

A starter kit will set you back by Rs 20,000. Arishtam and Brewmart have few options.

“Alcohol is a state subject. And every state is making their own rules,” says Singh. He doubts that the tap beer sitting in his restaurants in kegs can be salvaged.

Liquor stores are shut in Mumbai and Chennai. Delhi has only a few open, and even for those willing to pay a 70 per cent “special corona fee” there’re long queues to contend. In Gurugram, major liquor stores have barely any beer in stock. In Bengaluru, it’s flying off the shelves so quickly that it’s making headlines. Seven lakh litres of beer worth Rs 15 crore was sold on Day 2 in the state.

“Karnataka sells between 22 lakh and 26 lakh cases of beer every month. Less than three per cent of that is craft beer and most big players are quickly running out of stock,” says Hari Singh, founder of Briggs Brewery that makes four craft brews. Briggs has about 10,000 cases of beer ready for Bengaluru, Mangaluru and Chikmagalur, which, he says, should last about three months.

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Fresh beer is still out of question and in case you don’t see yourself in long, snaking queues outside overwhelmed liquor shops for craft beer that you might not find there, the only option is to brew your own. And no, it’s not called hooch.

Ask the beer nerds. Unlike in the US, where the culture of home brewing peaked about a decade ago, it’s still a small, hidden community in India. “Home brewing is riddled with opaque laws, which is preventing more people from taking it up as a hobby,” says Singh of Beer Café.

Apart from the dry states such as Bihar, Gujarat and Nagaland, where production and consumption is prohibited, the state excise departments regulate it by defining the amount of alcohol that can be stored for personal consumption. “There’s no law that defines how much you can home brew. It’s best to follow the state laws on storage as an indicator,” says Ankur Aggarwal, who runs one of the few online marketplaces dedicated to home brewing equipment and ingredients in India called Arishtam (a Sanskrit word that translates to “freedom from disease or illness”). It’s perfectly legal to ferment beer, he says, until you don’t distil it (now that’s hooch), use it for commercial purposes or transport it across state border.

Aggarwal started home brewing during his graduation years in the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. That was some 20 years ago. He then went on to do an MBA at IIM Lucknow while gathering extensive knowledge on fermentation.

Abhijeet Gupta, who is studying food technology in Noida is another nerd who geeks out on fermentation. He has gone from brewing a lager to a ginger ale to a mango IPA (Indian Pale Ale) within a year. But it has taken him more than a few attempts to get here. The last mango ale took him eight. “It’s heartbreaking to throw away beer, but a lot of factors can cause contamination,” says Gupta.

Amateurs are advised to start small, maybe a pilot batch of a litre at a time. And make something easy to follow, like a light lager. You can do it in your kitchen with a DIY apparatus – a large pot for making the wort, an empty 5-litre mineral water bottle as a fermentation tank. But you’ll still need some essential accessories: a thermometer, a hydrometer, an air lock, a siphon, a food-grade sanitiser and airtight glass bottles. For ingredients, you’ll need malted barley (or dried malt extract), some hops, some yeast and priming sugar.

If you go by popular YouTube videos, the process seems simple enough. Boil water and malt extract to convert it into sugar (a process called mashing), add hops as instructed to get the final liquid called wort, cool it and put it in a fermentation tank with yeast and let it sit for a week. Bottle it with some priming sugar, chill it and your first home brew is ready to drink. 

“But you need to understand fermentation and some important chemical processes beforehand,” insists Gupta. He goes on to study the yeast under a microscope to know its cell count, uses litmus paper to check the PH level of the water before beginning the process and knows a bacteria colony when he sees one. “At least people new to this should get a proper starter kit to avoid contamination,” he says. A starter kit will set you back by around Rs 20,000. Arishtam and BrewMart have a few options. Amazon has a few kits that are shipped from the US.

Aakash Agarwal has one in Kolkata. For him, home brewing started with an accident — the kind that gave him a hip fracture and forced him into a two-month bed rest. “I was stuck at home and desperately needed a hobby. Also, a reliable supply of beer,” he says.

His parents were sceptical but he convinced his father to help him with malted grains, a hydrometer, and so on, for the first batch. “It failed badly,” says Agarwal. He’s grown in skill since and now makes one case at a time, which lasts him a month. While people are struggling to get even a pint, he is happily exchanging "quarantine brews" with his friends.

There are also a few helpful apps: Brewing calculator and Calcoliamo Birra to help calculate the sugar content and the ABV (alcohol by volume), and also for some popular recipes; and BJCP 2015 for information on different brews and their specific requirements.

If the equipment – including your hands – is thoroughly cleaned with a food grade sanitiser, optimal temperature is maintained at every stage of the process and ingredients are carefully sourced, you will have your first batch ready before lockdown 3.0 ends. And unless you manage to completely mess it up and create a foul-smelling liquid and insist on calling it beer, making your own craft brew at home seems safer than stepping outside.