How Goa Became India's Spirit Playground

There's a particular kind of evening light in Goa.

- By Anushka Manik

The hour just before sunset when the sky dissolves into salted gold, the palms darken into silhouettes, and time itself seems to take a breath. At bars tucked into old Portuguese homes in Assagao, under softly rustling coconut trees in Mandrem, or inside tiled taverns in Panjim, you will overhear conversations that weren't part of the vocabulary in India even five years ago. Things like – fat-washed whisky, barrel-aged Negronis, Himalayan juniper, agave terroir, bianco vs rosso vermouth, and the list is endless.

India didn’t suddenly wake up to ‘better drinking’. It built a scene, and Goa became the lab.

Between 2019 and 2025, India’s premium spirit consumption grew at a CAGR of 10-14% (industry estimates), but the fastest growth wasn’t in Scotch or mass vodka, it was in craft gin and aperitif-style spirits. And while new bars were opening in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, the backbone of this cultural shift was quietly fermenting in Goa, where a cluster of homegrown distillers broke form, broke rules, and changed what Indian spirits could taste like.

Today, Goa is indisputably India's craft spirit capital. But that didn't happen by luck, it happened because Goa allowed imagination to exist.

Strange Experiment to Industry Capital

Goa was not always the epicentre for Indian spirits. But when early homegrown labels were trying to figure out where to set up, Goa did something the rest of India didn’t — it gave Indian craft spirits a home before the rest of the country even knew what that meant.