Malt matters: India’s first bunch of master blenders on their passion and the skills needed to shape the spirits

The term master distiller or master blender was rarely used in the Indian liquor industry until not too long ago. “And why would it be so? We mostly had column stills and nearly every distillery employed a set formula for input and output,” says Krishna Nukala, a Hyderabad-based whisky consultant and the only Indian member of Malt Maniacs, a global whisky collective. “The skills required to blend spirits, to be well versed in aging them, knowledge about casks, all of this was not really needed.” About two decades ago, though, as distilleries in the country decided to take a crack at single malt whisky, they needed men who looked at whisky differently and who could shape the spirits in their own inimitable way. “These men could pave the way for more master blenders. As the Indian liquor industry, even the IMFL space, goes more upmarket and moves away from artificial flavourings and focuses on quality ingredients, their tribe will only increase,” says Sanjeev Banga, president, international business, at Radico Khaitan, which makes Rampur Single Malt Whisky. CNBCTV18.com speaks to the first bunch of India’s master blenders about the unique challenges they faced and the road they took to arrive at their destination.

Up until the middle of this decade, my primary job was to sell Amrut to the world. But in 2015, I actually started distilling whisky and learnt the tricks of the trade and the nuances from our previous master distiller, Surinder Kumar. Selling Amrut has its highs, but the initial days were enormously challenging. Selling the idea of single malt whisky from India in 2004 was a Himalayan task and people in the West could not get their head around this concept. But all those years of travelling around Europe did provide me with immense exposure to the world of whisky and I complemented that by studying distilling formally.

Making whisky, and giving shape to your own interpretation of it, is a unique pleasure. I have been involved with the creation of several expressions, but I am particularly proud of Amrut Spectrum. Spectrum is essentially a five-wood whisky, and something like it had never been attempted before. The whisky was first aged for three years in bourbon barrels, and then transferred for a further three and a half years into casks made with a combination of new oak from America, France and Spain, along with ex-oloroso- and ex-Pedro-Ximenez sherry. It was not an easy thing to conceptualise, but it had both balance and complexity.