MEAD IN INDIA

Mead, an ancient honey-based fermented alcohol that is flavoured with natural fruits and spices, is making a comeback in India thanks to a handful of enthusiastic alcobev buffs

- SMITA TRIPATHI

Quick, what's common between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the Vikings? It’s mead (rhymes with need), an ancient honey-based fermented alcohol that’s slowly making a comeback in India with a handful of players producing it. “Mead is not beer,” says 38-year-old Rohan Rehani, Co-founder of Pune-based Moonshine Meadery —the very first meadery in India that started production in 2018.

Rehani and childhood friend Nitin Vishwas (38) read about mead in 2014 in an article that talked about how London was getting its first meadery in 500 years. Having only read about meads in Lord of the Rings (Gandalf takes swigs of it) and Harry Potter (Hagrid orders four pints at the Three Broomsticks Pub in Hogsmeade), they had thought of mead as something mythical that had been lost to time. “We were fascinated. Mead is probably the first known alcohol. It finds a mention in 7000 BC in Chinese pottery. The Vikings drank it before going into battle. Mead was also a part of ancient Indian culture. The word mead comes from the Old English word ‘medu’ that comes from ‘madhu,’ which is honey and then there is ‘madhushala,’ which is a place where you drink alcohol,” says Rehani.

Both Rehani and Vishwas are engineers by education and had corporate careers. In 2016, Rehani quit his job to make mead full time. What started as a kitchen experiment finally moved to a proper plant on the outskirts of Pune. However, since mead had not been made in India before, there was no provision for it in the excise law. “You could brew beer and ferment grapes to make wine but you could not ferment honey,” says Rehani.