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Various imported beers served at the Woodside Inn, Mumbai.

Hotelier India finds out whether the Indian hospitality industry is ready to revisit a beverage that has for long been taken for granted as one that flows silently from tap to mug.

What’s usually amber, most frequently consumed and highest margin for the hotel bar? What’s been long overlooked and viewed as a standard drink given attention only a little above clear, potable water? The tipple at the centre of this contrasting but mostly indisputable reality is beer and the context is Indian hospitality.

The last six years have seen a rush of diverse wines and spirits dot the Indian hotel bars, thickening the menus, enriching staff with knowledge, perspective and durable enthusiasm.

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That’s the cruel irony about the talked up wine revolution in India. And yet, while wine has only launched a full scale invasion of the bar in less than 10 years, the poor man’s frothy drink has been around since the Brits pushed us around.

Beer speak in India goes little beyond draft or pint, domestic or imported. Consequently India’s annual per capita consumption of beer is a mere 1 litre whereas in countries like China, it is 25 litres. Worse, 76 per cent of all beer consumed in India is strong beer. So how did it come to this and is there a thick enough foam of hope capping the fluid, tepid interest in beer?

De-hyphenation of beer
Ankur Jain, proprietor of Delhi-based Cerana Imports who has been importing a wide range of gourmet beers for over four years now, says, “Beer in India, at this point, is still where cars were in 1991. We know what they are in a sense but not the variety of them.

The tragedy for the Indian beer drinker is that beer has been commoditised, produced on an industrial scale and the selling pitch has been low price and high alcohol.

Worldwide, the perception of beer is changing – it’s a gourmet drink and craft beers are preferred over industrial ones. The greatest irony for India is that it is in fact a more relevant market for beer.

It’s a tropical country where beer is traditionally the preferred drink. What’s more, many beer varieties sit well with our cuisine. So, the limited offering of domestic beer in that it’s predominantly lager and pilsner is an astonishing anomaly of our times”.

The main brick wall that faces beer in the on-premise segment where new trends are most likely to sprout, is that it is a mindset that has hardened over the years.

“Beer is seen as a commodity like any of the mass products that hotels consume and therefore it’s open to cost cutting, particularly in austere times like this. It is coupled with the bottom-end spirits, which are standard fare at many of the hotels.

While there is a premium import segment that is continually replenished, beer features sparingly in that list. This is what needs to change. Beer needs to be de-hyphenated from this clutch and added to the premium segment and it’s the food and beverage department alone that should be empowered to make decisions about the given property’s or chain’s beer portfolio.

Jain has livened up the market with import of beer sorts from Belgium Trappists to German wheat beers and ales and iconic American IPA and is now upping the ante with the import of seasonal gourmet beers, which will only be available during a specific time of the year and the import stock will consist of a few 100 cases.