Two Indians, Chandra Mohan and Sargheve Sukumaran, have become the first to sell a hybrid beer in Poland that combines Indian rice flakes with European hops. A year ago, Chandra Mohan, an Indian living in Poland, found himself in a crisis when he was saddled with 20,000 kg (44,092 lb) of rice flakes that a business client didn’t want to pick it up. The rice flakes, supplied by a firm based in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, were being imported by a local businessman to make cereals. The war in Ukraine had just begun. Four days before the ship carrying the consignment was due at the port in Poland, Mr Mohan’s client got cold feet as the exchange rate fluctuated.
Mr Mohan bought the flakes and along with his designer friend Sargheve Sukumaran hit up on an idea of making a beer. “Chandran said, ‘I am thinking of a beer called Malayali,'” Mr Sukumaran recounts. Both men were clear that the beer needed to use the rice flakes but should not be “a rice-y beer.” The idea wasn’t entirely new. “There is already Japanese beer that is made of rice with Japanese hops,” Mr Mohan says. The idea was to distinguish their product by having rice flavour beer with European hops.
Mr Mohan and Mr Sukumaran turned to another Malayali for advice. Lijo Phillip had launched his own beer brand – Kalikut 1498 – in Poland before the pandemic. Kalikut is another way of spelling Calicut (now called Kozhikode) – a district in Kerala. With his guidance, Mr Mohan and Mr Sukumaran worked on producing their own beer. The challenge was now to produce the beer on a large scale. They two got into an arrangement with a brewery which insisted on taking a boiler on rent with a minimum order. This meant they had to get restaurants on board to serve their beer. Now, Malayali Spirits – the company set up by him and Mr Sukumaran – has a contract with a distributor for Indian and Asian grocery stories to supply 2,400 litres (5,074 pints) of beer every two months. The company claims it has sold over 50,000 bottles of beer so far.
