Mead In India

Rohan Rehani and Nitin Vishwas with their Pune-based Moonshine Meadery are changing the way we look at drinking mead. Society chats with these young founders on selling something out of the box.

- Sapna Sarfare

India loves its drinks. You don’t even need to explain it to people as just a look around will give away our obsession with alcohol. We don’t need an excuse to pick up that glass of one’s favourite poison and say ‘Bottom’s Up’. Quite a few young ones’ are now getting into the start-up mode and creating a niche for themselves in the alcohol market. One such name is Moonshine meadery, Asia’s first meadery in Pune. It has been started by two young enthusiastic people Rohan Rehani and Nitin Vishwas who want modern India to take up to mead. They are into getting the best out of every sip by getting natural and local produces for making the meads. It is about mixing quality and innovation for a unique drinking experience with mead. They are apparently quite keen on getting new interesting combination of flavours with ingredients.

Most of the drinkers are aware of the usual hard drinks but mead is something of a novelty for them. Ask the brains behind Moonshine Meadery about it and pat comes the reply. “Mead is the oldest alcoholic beverage known to man and is made by fermenting honey using water and yeast. While documented evidence goes back to 7000 BC, historians believe it to be 25,000 years old, predating agriculture. It is neither a beer nor a wine but an independent category by itself,” replies Rohan. “There are many styles of mead — some whose flavours profile is defined by the honey (usually called traditional mead, the closest you can get to historic meads of old), others with the addition of fruits and spices. They can be sweet, dry or semi-dry and carbonated or still.”