Drinks with strangers
When cousins Vidur Gupta and Sakshi Saigal teamed up with Indian beverage industry disruptor Rahul Mehra (who helped found Gateway Brewing Co. India’s first craft brewery, and Svami Drinks the country’s first artisanal tonic and mixers company), they were determined to shake up the Indian liquor market. “It began in 2016, when I was working in the UK and Sakshi had completed her MBA at Barcelona. I had been exposed to a lot of the whisky culture of Scotland while there, and gin had been really picking up in Spain and beyond at the time.
We realised that a lot of these foreign premium spirits use so much Indian rhetoric in their brand stories because of our history and the colonial legacy, but there’s no domestic quality product that is telling it from our perspective,” recalls Vidhur, 28, pointing out that craft beer had just started becoming a thing in India, but premium quality locally made spirits such as gin, which have a storied history in India, didn’t exist. The cousins invested their savings and embarked into a lot of research (and drinking all kinds of gins), before setting up their main production facilities in a former pepper farm in Goa, deciding to collaborate with Mehra along the way.
The brand, which was launched in 2018, began with sales in Goa, Maharashtra, and Delhi NCR, before spreading further afield. “In terms of cities, Delhi-NCR sees the best sales, while Maharashtra has the most sales in states. We are now also going to be selling in Rajasthan, Assam, Telangana, West Bengal and Punjab, within India, with UAE and Australia being the first international markets we have ventured into,”
shares Vidur. And people are lapping it up, with the brand having recently won the ‘Gold-Outstanding’ at the International Wine & Spirit Competition 2020.
With a near-perfect score (98/100), out of 800 brands that participated, only eight gins globally won this award and Stranger & Sons was the only Indian brand to be recognised by the IWSC. Indeed, it is only Indian spirits brand to have won several international plaudits of its kind.
Vidur says he and his partners are committed to creating other quality products of international quality with an intrinsically Indian perspective. “That being said, we are also aware of the environmental impact and do everything we can to minimise the carbon footprint, whether it’s with our production facilities to our bottling and labelling. There are no plastics being used anywhere and we recycle all the possible elements we can,” he concludes.
INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION
With a score 98/100, out of 800 brands that participated, only eight gins globally won this award and Stranger & Sons was the only Indian brand to be recognised by the International Wine & Spirit Competition 2020.