An
award-winning innovative entrepreneur in the alcobev industry, Goa based Desmond Nazareth is currently the
toast of the country with his latest achievement, of launching an India Adivasi
spirit and reintroducing it to the world. Both their international quality
Mahua products are strong, at 40% alc/vol, unlike country spirit mahua, which
is sold and consumed at around 10% alc/vol.
DJ Mahua spirit is multiple-distilled, hence clear and smooth,
with a mildly sweet fragrance and a pleasant floral after-taste, inspired by
the much lower strength single-distilled tribal version, which tends to be
cloudy.
DJ Mahua liqueur, a creation of Agave India, incorporates DJ
Mahua spirit, honey and oils from select Indian spices and hence has a honey
and spice aroma, and a warm, earthy after-taste.
Desmond Nazareth is the principal founder and MD of Agave India,
a company set up in 2007. He is a successful serial entrepreneur, with
international work and travel experience, in a variety of fields. Born in
Bombay in 1957, he has been educated in pure and applied sciences, computer
science and multimedia. He grew up in a variety of places scattered across
India, studied and worked for 17 years in the USA, moved back to India in 2000
and is currently based in Goa.
Goa-registered Agave India owns India’s first and only rurally
based ‘greenfield’ small batch ‘field-to-bottle’ and ‘forest-to-bottle’ craft
distillery, using Indian know-how, in rural Andhra Pradesh. Its leased storage
and bottling facility is in South Goa.
Now,
finally, their DJ Mahua products have hit the Goa market along with the 2018
monsoon, allowing for possible DJ Mahua Monsoon Madness celebrations. Desmond
hopes that their new ‘India pride’ and ‘Indian tribal heritage homage’ mahua
products will be ‘the thing’ for locals and visitors to imbibe, starting with
this season.
Café
speaks to Desmond to find out more about this journey:
HERALD CAFÉ: Your
journey from hearing about mahua to learning about the culture of the Adivasi
and working on your spirits must have been an interesting one. Can you walk us
through that journey?
DESMOND NAZARETH: I
first came across tribal mahua about nearly two decades ago, while I was
travelling in eastern Gujarat. I was not impressed with the quality but
recognised its potential as a distilled spirit. We started work on, and
permissions for, our rural Andhra Pradesh (AP) craft distillery in 2007. At
that time, mahua was on my list of future spirits to work on, since I was
starting with Indian Agave spirit, which was the original inspiration for the
company; we started manufacturing it in 2011. Pragmatism and strategy made me
postpone exploring mahua further till about 2013, when I started the permission
process. It took five years of hard work convincing centrally run FSSAI,
several state governments and myriad officials to allow us to make and sell
mahua as non-country liquor, a high-end product in the Indian context.
But
getting back to the story, I started looking for samples of mahua and trying to
connect with tribals in 2013. I managed to make some headway after much travel
and effort in central Maharashtra, as locals were not forthcoming to a stranger
asking for mahua, which is largely illicitly distilled and consumed, and
outside the tax net.
I
used the relatively small amounts of mahua flower that I was able to procure to
conduct kitchen-scale experiments to understand and fine-tune the fermentation
and distillation process, and taste-test the results with the cognoscenti. I
simultaneously started establishing connections to tribal area NGOs in Orissa
and Jharkhand areas to introduce me to the tribal groups themselves. We
travelled through a few other central Indian states as well, studying the
various local ingredients and methods people were using to ferment and distil
mahua. Almost all were using unhygienic and sometimes questionable raw
materials, additives, containers and uninformed processes, which resulted in a
range of poor quality mahua product. Hapless tribal distillers are clearly
locked in a vicious cycle of low quality and low price.
Eventually,
we worked with three tribal groups to collect clean mahua in 2017 and shipped
the same to our craft distillery in AP, where it went through further cleaning
and hygiene, prior to fermentation. The pure natural taste of a fermentative
substrate like mahua flowers is mainly possible with great attention to
cleanliness.
HC: Were there
any other obstacles you’ll faced in executing this project?
DN: As you can
imagine, our five-year journey has been fraught with numerous obstacles and
hurdles, mainly of a bureaucratic kind. We persevered, with much sweat and
toil, and have now broken through, with another ‘first’ for our Indian alcobev
innovation-driven craft company, Agave India. Our tribal partners, NGO
well-wishers and our team can look back with great pride at this achievement,
furthering an India pride story that might, in the long run, help India get its
first Geographical Indicator (GI) based on a truly pan- Indian tribal story.
HC: In many ways,
you are promoting India through this product. What has been the response from
the locals of that region in Andhra Pradesh and those who have been associated
with this in the past?
DN: We are surely
acting as a mid-wife of sorts in the rebirth and re imagining of what has
hitherto been an underwraps, indifferent quality tribal drink, deeply rooted in
Central Indian tribal culture. Putting our international quality version and
further expressions of mahua-based alcobev products on the global map via
international competitions and global exports is certainly one of our
longer-term ambitions.
Tribal
groups that we have worked with us have treated our venture with amusement,
tolerance and justifiable scepticism, even as they appreciated the premium
price we were paying for hygienic mahua flowers that they provided us. They
will now have a chance to see how their much beloved mahua, which has a certain
mythic status in urban North India, can be moved up the value chain. Hopefully,
some entrepreneurially inclined tribals can study our model and learn from our
mistakes and experience. The coming year will provide more insights to all of
us involved.
HC: What is the
latest on the GI protection for this? Have there been talks with the
authorities about the same?
DN:GI protection
for Mahua is something that can be initiated by the Indian government, but only
after there are several official manufacturers, who agree on certain
international quality standards and regulations. So we have not pushed to
initiate this process as of now, as tribal producers will not currently be able
to easily make their mahua to international standards. We will wait for some
other non-country liquor mahua manufacturers to get started, which may take
some time, following which, attempts at formulating and establishing a GI will
make sense.
HC: Ever since
news about your launch has broken out, there has been a tremendous response
from all quarters. While this should augur well for the future, how do you feel
about the response you have received so far?
DN: We were kind
of expecting a good response, similar to when we introduced all our other
world-class alcobev products, some of which are being sold in the US and
shortly in Europe, via co-branding partners. But the response to the limited
press we have got on our Mahua products since the first national article has
been overwhelming. There is a great deal of excitement, especially from North
Indian and urban folks and there has been much engagement on social media, with
inquiries already coming about exports.
HC: How have the
soft launches gone so far and when is the official launch?
DN: The first soft launch was on June
15, at an exciting new Panjim art space, ‘For the Record’. We will be doing
more soft launches over the next few months. For the record, we have never had
an ‘official’ launch in our company history. We are stocking major Goa
retailers over the next few weeks and then plan to approach bars to introduce
them to our products, starting with the high-end ones.
Pull-Quotes:
“As a Goa based company, we are pleased to always initially launch our
latest and greatest products in alcohol-friendly Goa. We encourage all locals
and visitors to Goa to sample and buy our exciting new Mahua products.
Especially bartenders, who can creatively use them to mix new signature cocktails as our products lend themselves to
tasty, simple cocktails.”
“The announcement about Mahua going mainstream has touched a national
nerve, as native Indian alcohol products have been discouraged and even
suppressed, initially by the colonial powers and then by various Indian
governments till the present day. There
is a palpable, waiting-to-exhale feeling expressed by many, which we are
tickled pink to have inspired with our announcement. People have been asking
why our Mahua products are only being sold in Goa for now. We will need various
states to give us permissions and that, going by our experience, may take
time.”
“All our products have been made with attention to international
standards and processes for pot-still distillation, some of which we have
pioneered and documented officially for India. While I cannot get into detail,
suffice it to say that we take a ‘fundamentalist’ approach, creating and
using our own processes that rely on basics of fermentation and distillation,
but paying particular attention to hygiene, natural bio-chemical processes
unaided by non-essential chemicals and indigenously perfecting what is called
the art of multiple distillation, which we learned from mainly from experience.
Note that there’s always science and art involved in the making of world-class
alcohol.”
AGAVE INDIA – CRAFTING CLASS
Agave India
makes international quality agave spirits from Indian blue-green agave,
sugarcane spirits from Indian sugarcane and mahua spirits from the uniquely
Indian mahua flower growing in the tribal forests of Central India. It also
makes several liqueurs and alcoholic cocktail blends, including orange liqueurs
and mahua liqueur. It has recently started working with Indian craft beer
companies to make craft Indian agave beer, mahua beer and sugar cane beer. It
works directly with villagers and tribal people to collect raw material and
maximise their returns. The craft distillery is environmentally friendly and
uses all its solid and liquid waste on site. The company is also socially
conscious, believing in equal pay for male and female workers, and maintains an
anti-corruption stance. It has about 40 employees located in Andhra Pradesh,
Goa, Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune.
Agave India products are sold under the
master brand name, ‘DesmondJi’ or ‘DJ’, currently in Goa, Bangalore, Mumbai,
Pune, and Delhi. Its premium 100% agave spirit product is co-branded with a
Europe based brand, Porfidio, and sold in the USA. It is in the process of
exporting agave spirit and cane spirit to a Denmark based
distiller/distributor, again with a co-branding perspective.
