MUMBAI: This 12 months, skip the same old and have fun Worldwide Ladies’s Day with a daring pour of Hazy Ardour. It’s the flavour of 2025 for the Ladies Brewers Collective (WBC).
This collective of ladies brewers is leaving its mark on the beer business
Every year, the members create a brand new concoction, which they launch on March 8, Worldwide Ladies’s Day. This 12 months, 16 ladies put their heads collectively and got here up with Hazy Ardour, a brew that makes use of hazy NEIPA and pineapple ardour yeast. “We are dedicating this brew to women who are new to the industry and are hazy about taking up brewing professionally,” smiles Lynette Pires, including that the brew will launch on the Bira91 Taproom in Mumbai.
Pires, a grasp brewer at 46 Ounces Brewgarden, a microbrewery in Bengaluru, based the collective in 2021 to create an area the place ladies within the beer business might join with one another. “When I started out ten years ago, there weren’t many people to talk to,” she recollects, decided to alter that. The collective, launched with 5 ladies, is now a neighborhood of 26, and its numbers are rising.
Pires has a background in prescription drugs however made the transfer to brewing as a result of she grew up seeing wine and feni being made, and the fascination by no means fairly light. Now, as a brewer, she desires to encourage extra ladies to enter the sector.
Daring, proficient and unafraid to shake issues up, the ladies on this collective are taking over a male-dominated area. Swati Shinde, WBC member and a brewer on the Mumbai-based Gateway Brewing Co, says the variety of ladies brewers in India is steadily rising. “Not just women with a background in beer or wine, but even those who have studied biotechnology or chemistry are showing an interest. We help them the best we can,” says Shinde, whose father was part of the wine business and was inspired by him to tackle brewing as a profession. That was 16 years in the past.
Daring new flavours
Now is a superb time to change into a brewer, since there’s a rising curiosity in craft beer throughout India. “Fuelled in large part by the pub culture, there’s a young demographic eager to try new flavours and concoctions,” says Kajal Manchanda, a Mumbai-based WBC member and innovation brewer at Bira91. Manchanda studied microbiology in faculty, the place she learnt about fermentation and brewing processes. This triggered an curiosity in beer making and she or he signed up for a Grasp’s diploma in Wine Brewing and Alcohol Know-how from Pune’s Vasantdada Sugar Institute. That was greater than eight years in the past.
Artisanal and craft beer have grown in reputation within the final decade. “When I started out ten years ago, there were hardly any breweries,” recollects Pires. “But I had great mentors, and people who were willing to hear me out.” With WBC, Pires is creating that very same comforting expertise for younger ladies coming into the sector at present.
And it’s working. WBC member Kirti Suryawanshi, the youngest head brewer within the nation, is all of 26. Working at Mumbai-based Rolling Mills, she earned the identical diploma as Manchanda did. Suryawanshi grew keen on brewing whereas in faculty, after she accompanied a buddy who was interning at Kingfisher. “I saw a woman brewer there and it ignited a spark in me to know more,” she recollects. Nonetheless a pupil then, Suryawanshi began house brewing, and craft beer emerged as the reply.
Native components
Shinde says the collective goes all out to advertise beer within the state. They’re utilizing native components like zini rice, nice millet and pearl millet, and arising with some daring new concoctions. “First, we choose a grain. Then, depending on the season and what’s available locally, we might decide to add certain ingredients. For instance, during summer, mint or lemon find their way into the brew. The brewer also combs through the vast variety of foods and spices India has to offer, to find things that might sync with their vision for the beer,” she explains.
Recalling her personal eureka second, Manchanda says she just lately created a stout impressed by Goa’s favorite dessert, bebinca. “We tried to replicate it, adding ingredients like nutmeg, coconut and cinnamon to the beer.”
Pires says her travels to Uttarakhand impressed an entire new recipe. “I saw rhododendron, those bright red lowers, everywhere. They’re using them in everything. Even our welcome drink was made with them. I like to innovate and experiment, so finding ingredients like that is important.”
WBC offers ladies brewers a protected area to share concepts and innovate. Whereas members of the collective meet annually, they join by way of a WhatsApp group and help and uplift one another. Pires says the collective is able to take a leap ahead and launch studying classes, the place the ladies brewers can study and develop collectively. Internships for youthful members are additionally on the playing cards.