Indian microbrewery ready for debut

In: News

4 Nov 2010

Calcutta’s beer culture will hit a high with the city’s first microbrewery, Hops, gearing up to turn its tap this festive season at South City Mall.

“We hope to get the necessary excise licence to brew beer on our premises for captive consumption by our clientele soon,” Biswanath Bhattacharya, a partner in the project, tells Metro.

“Yes, we have received a couple of applications for licence to set up microbreweries, which have been forwarded to the state government,” says Gautam Hazra, the additional commissioner (foreign liquor) in the excise department, without naming Hops. The state will formulate guidelines for “this new line of business”, the excise official adds.

A “brewpub” brews and sells beer on the premises and is categorised as “microbrewery” if it produces fewer than 10,000 barrels of beer and ale a year, primarily for in-house consumption.

Wikipedia traces the origin of the “microbrewery” concept to the UK in the late 1970s to “describe the new generation of small breweries which focused on producing traditional cask ale”.

Originally used to differentiate breweries according to their size, the term “microbrewery” gradually came to reflect “an alternative attitude and approach to brewing flexibility, adaptability, experimentation and customer service”.

Bhattacharya and his partner, who also runs the world-cuisine stop Gamma’s at City Centre 2 in New Town, have put in over Rs 2 crore on German brewing equipment alone.

They have also procured the prototype of micro-brewing rules and regulations from the Haryana government, which had formulated the guidelines for Howzzat, among the country’s first few microbreweries, as “critical inputs” for the state excise department.

The sprawling Hops on the second level of the mall now functions as a 140-cover world-cuisine restaurant in the daytime and turns into a “slounge bar” in the evening — a multi-pronged resto-lounge-bar format complete with hookah parlour and pub, dance pad, live pasta and salad counters and in-house DJ.

Plans are afoot to introduce theme evenings, with guest DJs flown in from Singapore and Hong Kong.

“We did a survey before broadening our mall’s F&B spread, and found out that Calcutta’s beer bias is on an upswing. We are confident the concept of freshly brewed beer, also served in various flavours, will rock,” declares Manmohan Bagree, vice-president (commercial & marketing), South City Projects.

Bagree feels the brewpub will offer “an attractive alternative” to Park Street and central Calcutta for party-goers from the southern parts. Young software writer Shamik Seal, back from an assignment in the US recently, agrees that a brewpub is a sign of a metro “arriving”, and hopes microbrews would proliferate.

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