India’s love of homegrown single malts shakes up Pernod, Diageo

Indian single malt whisky, Longitude 77, bottles sit on a shelf for sale at a liquor store in Gurugram, India, December 11, 2023. REUTERS/Sahiba Chawdhary

OAK casks, once used to store bourbon and wine, are stacking up in a distillery near New Delhi, filled with ageing whisky as workers churn out almost 10,000 bottles a day of Indian single malt Indri, recently named the world’s best whisky.

Sugarcane and mustard fields, not peat bogs, ring the distillery, where the two-year-old Indian brand’s owner Piccadily is ramping up production and building a three-hole golf course to lure connoisseurs and tipplers in the whisky-loving nation.