BANGALORE: At the Polo Club bar in Bangalore's swank Oberoi Hotel, the most popular drink these days is not a whisky highball, once the automatic choice of well-heeled Indians tipplers.
For the young and rich, it's a toss-up between a margarita with tequila, Cointreau, lemon juice, sugar syrup and fresh fruit and a caprioshka with vodka, mint and lemon, white and brown sugar, served over crushed ice.
"More Indians do want to experiment with vodka and tequila-based cocktails," said Udiksha Mehta, assistant food and beverage manager at the hotel who also runs the Polo Club.
Drinks based on premium vodka, white rum and tequila make up half the hotel's consumption of liquor, Mehta said, indicating a shift in preference to more expensive and mainly imported "white spirits" as the economy booms. That's a wave foreign spirits makers are trying to ride as India opens up its rapidly growing, two-billion-dollar liquor market by lowering import duties in a move welcomed by the United States and the European Union.
Duties as high as 550 percent have meant that a bottle of imported vodka costs many times what it sells for most other parts of the world. Bacardi Martini has been waiting for "ridiculously high duties" to be cut to spur sales of its "super premium" Grey Goose brand in India, where it retails for more than 70 dollars a bottle, Jayant Kapur, chief of the Bermuda-based brewer's Indian unit, said recently.
India will do away with an "additional customs duty" on imports of distilled spirits, reducing tariffs to as low as 150 percent, the finance ministry announced last week.
The cut may boost already vaulting consumption of white spirits in the world's second-most populous nation, as an economy expanding nine percent a year and rising salaries leave young consumers with more cash. White spirits have doubled their share of a whisky-dominated market, which consumed 120 million cases of liquor last year, to 20 percent by volume and 25 percent by value in eight years, said Kapur.
Consumption of such alcohol is growing by as much as 30 percent a year, almost twice the 16 percent pace of the overall beverages market, as youthful Indians key into a global trend.
"With a booming economy, Indian consumers are increasingly connected to global trends and looking for newer experiences," said Kapur. "Young Indians don't want to drink what their fathers and grandfathers drank."
The median age of India's 1.1 billion population is estimated to be 24, and college students and those in their first jobs are stoking demand for consumer products ranging from designer clothes and fast bikes to premium drinks. Marketing professional Dhruv Ghosh, 30, says he prefers to drink white spirits because "I've never had a hangover on these drinks."
"You can mix them with anything -- juices, soft drinks -- and have them" said Ghosh, who started with beer at age 19 and experimented with whisky but found it "too hard" for his taste.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2185858.cms
For the young and rich, it's a toss-up between a margarita with tequila, Cointreau, lemon juice, sugar syrup and fresh fruit and a caprioshka with vodka, mint and lemon, white and brown sugar, served over crushed ice.
"More Indians do want to experiment with vodka and tequila-based cocktails," said Udiksha Mehta, assistant food and beverage manager at the hotel who also runs the Polo Club.
Drinks based on premium vodka, white rum and tequila make up half the hotel's consumption of liquor, Mehta said, indicating a shift in preference to more expensive and mainly imported "white spirits" as the economy booms. That's a wave foreign spirits makers are trying to ride as India opens up its rapidly growing, two-billion-dollar liquor market by lowering import duties in a move welcomed by the United States and the European Union.
Duties as high as 550 percent have meant that a bottle of imported vodka costs many times what it sells for most other parts of the world. Bacardi Martini has been waiting for "ridiculously high duties" to be cut to spur sales of its "super premium" Grey Goose brand in India, where it retails for more than 70 dollars a bottle, Jayant Kapur, chief of the Bermuda-based brewer's Indian unit, said recently.
India will do away with an "additional customs duty" on imports of distilled spirits, reducing tariffs to as low as 150 percent, the finance ministry announced last week.
The cut may boost already vaulting consumption of white spirits in the world's second-most populous nation, as an economy expanding nine percent a year and rising salaries leave young consumers with more cash. White spirits have doubled their share of a whisky-dominated market, which consumed 120 million cases of liquor last year, to 20 percent by volume and 25 percent by value in eight years, said Kapur.
Consumption of such alcohol is growing by as much as 30 percent a year, almost twice the 16 percent pace of the overall beverages market, as youthful Indians key into a global trend.
"With a booming economy, Indian consumers are increasingly connected to global trends and looking for newer experiences," said Kapur. "Young Indians don't want to drink what their fathers and grandfathers drank."
The median age of India's 1.1 billion population is estimated to be 24, and college students and those in their first jobs are stoking demand for consumer products ranging from designer clothes and fast bikes to premium drinks. Marketing professional Dhruv Ghosh, 30, says he prefers to drink white spirits because "I've never had a hangover on these drinks."
"You can mix them with anything -- juices, soft drinks -- and have them" said Ghosh, who started with beer at age 19 and experimented with whisky but found it "too hard" for his taste.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2185858.cms