Brewcraft Microbrewing, a Pune-based company, floated three years ago by two IIM alumni, is

RELATED ARTICLES Starbucks expanding beer, wine sales this year

all set to serve beer from the tap at an elite club in the city.

The company plans to start six more such facilities – called microbreweries -- within two years – in cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Goa. The company will officially sell the beer under the brandname ‘Doolally’.

Suketu Talekar, an IIM Bangalore graduate and his partner, Prateek Chaturvedi, an IIM Calcutta graduate, who joined the Singapore office of Procter and Gamble in July 2004, quit after many discussions over top quality beer, guzzling some of it at Brewertz, a watering hole in Singapore.

The duo says their dream took shape at the award winning microbrewery restaurant Brewerkz, whose American owner, an investment banker, who quit the job and started the brewing beer and selling it successfully. “If he could do it, why we can’t?” Chaturvedi, 30, founder director, Brewcraft Microbrewing, said.

Soon they quit their jobs and came back to Pune to start Brewcrafts Microbrewing in 2006. The third partner and brew master Oliver Schauf, 34, from Germany joined them later.

In their first joint venture with Corinthian Club in Pune, they have set up the brewery in the backyard of the club. They will start serving the beer on tap to the “discerning audience” by the end of this month.

“The beer will be served to the club members and in the Boutique Hotel slated to be launched on September 27,” Arun Arora, general manager, Corinthian Club, told Financial Chronicle.

“Our niche beer is ready for the discerning audience and we have partnered with the Corinthian Club,” Talekar, 31, founder director of Brewcraft Microbrewing, says.

Talekar says the company had invested Rs 5 crore in German distillation machinery and hired a German brewer to help with the production. “There are two types of beer: an industrial beer produced on a big scale for the common man and a niche fresh beer with better taste, smell, look and flavour,” he said.

“The idea is that each beer has a different recipe,” Talekar says. From the flavour of the grain (barley or wheat, malted or otherwise) to the amount of bitterness (from the hops), everything has been played with to make different beer.Usually, nobody talks of beer tastes, Talekar says. “But once the clients drink our beer, handcrafted by an artist, people with taste for beer will ask for more,” The company will serve five styles of beer: regular lager, Weiss bier (German wheat), dark larger, apple cider and brown ale.

VP Chinchalkar, superintendent of the state excise department said that this was the first microbrewery in Maharashtra, which had been given a license to produce and sell not more than 200,000 litres of beer annually. The license fee per annum is Rs 25,000 plus Rs 20 excise duty per litre, he added.

Talekar says the company plans to launch five more microbreweries in metros.At present, there are only two.