The Desi Spirit

Desmond Nazareth set up a craft distillery when he couldn’t find tequila in India. Now, he’s managed to distil traditional mahua to international standards

- Monica Bathija

In the 18 years he has spent researching and working in the alcohol space, craft distiller Desmond Nazareth has several firsts to his credit—from making home-grown agave-based spirits to manufacturing artisanal cachaça-style sugarcane spirits.

His latest, also a first, is the traditional tribal drink mahua, potstilled to international standards, which was launched in Goa in June. “Mahua must be the world’s only flower-based distilled spirit. There are liqueurs made out of sweet flowers, because you can extract the essence of the flowers, but that’s not the same as fermenting and distillation,” says Nazareth, founder and managing director of Agave India, whose portfolio also includes liqueurs and cocktail blends.

Nazareth had been working on mahua since 2013, sourcing flowers and experimenting even as he tried to acquire the licences to make and sell what was essentially a ‘country liquor’. By law, it cannot be sold outside the state it is distilled in. “It took a good four years for the state in which I had my distillery, Andhra Pradesh, to give me permission to make mahua,” says the 61-year-old former IITian who had to go back and forth with the authorities to make it a non-country spirit. “Eventually, I was able to convince the authorities there that every international spirit started as a country spirit in some country,” he says.

Nazareth is no stranger to finding solutions to problems. In fact, all his projects, he says, result from questions he asks himself. “If I can’t find an answer, then I start digging deeper and sometimes end up discovering things.”

As he did in 2000 when the software developer, partaker of alcohol and amateur cocktail maker landed from the US and found that tequila wasn’t easily available in India.