Gurgaon: The Shining Star for Craft Beer Buffs

India is witnessing the emergence of quality micro brewing with more and more brewpubs springing up across key metro cities. The Clock Tower, which recently opened in Gurgaon, takes this trend ahead.

- Rohan Kichlu

A microbrewery or craft brewery is a brewery that produces small amounts of beer, typically much smaller than large-scale corporate breweries, and is independently owned. Such breweries are generally characterized by their emphasis on quality, flavour and hands on brewing techniques. The microbrewing movement began in the United Kingdom in the 1970s although traditional artisanal brewing existed in Europe for centuries and subsequently spread to other countries. As the movement grew and some breweries expanded their production and distribution, the more encompassing concept of craft brewing emerged.

Brewpub is an abbreviated term combining the ideas of a brewery and a pub or public-house. A brewpub can be a pub or restaurant that brews beer on the premises. Although the term “microbrewery” was originally used in relation to the size of breweries, it gradually came to reflect an alternative attitude and approach to brewing fl exibility, adaptability, experimentation and customer service. The term and trend spread to the US in the 1980s and was eventually used as a designation for breweries that produce fewer than 15,000 U.S. beer barrels (1,800,000 liters; 460,000 U.S. gallons) annually.

Microbreweries have adopted a marketing strategy that differs from those of the large, massmarket breweries, offering products that compete on the basis of quality and diversity instead of low price and advertising. Their influence has been much greater than their market share, which amounts to only 2 per cent in the UK, indicated by the introduction of large commercial breweries of new brands for the craft beer market. However, when the strategy failed, corporate breweries invested in microbreweries or, in many cases, acquired them outright.