White Owl: Crafting An Indian Beer

With a singular aim of creating top-notch, locally-handcrafted beer, White Owl Brewery which started brewing in October 2014 at a tiny craft brewery in Mumbai, has now grown by leaps and bounds serving unique chilled craft beers across restaurants, bars and retail stores. Javed Murad, founder, White Owl Brewery shares his journey from that small brewery to launching India’s first locally brewed bottled cider

- Akshay Nayak

“I stumbled upon some great beer when I was in the grad school in Boston in 2007. At the time, craft beer really started picking up in the US. It was so easily available everywhere and so well priced that whenever I visited Mumbai for a holiday, it became glaringly apparent that we needed a better beer,” reminisces Javed Murad, founder, White Owl Brewery, about the spark that initiated the idea to start White Owl. A few years later, after having discussed this with friends, mentors, and colleagues, he decided to actually do something about it and moved back to put together a detailed business plan that culminated in the birth of the company.

Plugging into the craft beer segment

Although the beer space in India may have many brands already, the skew is very lopsided, Murad feels. “On the one hand, our consumer has a large number of options for a typical low-cost, mass-produced beer that will always form the bulk of every market. In stark contrast, there are almost no options available in the premium beer segment, where quality and craft supersede cost. In my opinion, this phenomenon completely mismatches the trajectory of our young, growing, urban population that has begun to earn well, has its finger on the pulse at all times and is continuously making finer, more evolved consumption choices. This is the gap that White Owl is addressing in India,” he explains the reason behind entering the craft beer segment.