A biography of beer and why Delhi should make its own

I just got to know that Gurgaon's Sector-29 shopping centre, the Millennium City's second big foodie magnet after Cyber Hub, has more than a dozen microbreweries. I wonder therefore what's stopping the Delhi government, despite its stated support for the idea, from green-lighting microbreweries on our side of the border and slaking the city's growing thirst for the brew that's closest to a craft beer.

As we await that elusive green signal, I must share with you the insights that I gained into the techniques of micro-brewing from Amritanshu Gupta, a sweet-shop-owner-turned-restaurateur who introduced the idea to Chandigarh in 2011 and has since then been getting every award possible for Hops n Grains (Sector-9, Panchkula), apart from a 4.5-star rating from Zomato.

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An MBA from Australia, Amritanshu was determined to get into the food and drinks business after coming back home, although his parents, both committed vegetarians, couldn't countenance the idea of their son selling non-vegetarian dishes and alcoholic beverages.

To keep his parents happy, Amritanshu ran a sweet shop for about seven years, but then he seized the first opportunity he got to set up a microbrewery, and he must be doing very well, for he has just opened a second called The Great Bear in Sector-26, Chandigarh.

Amritanshu and his wife and business partner Priyanka, an MBBS from Mysore, are among the innovators who have changed the personality of Chandigarh, turning it from a town of retirees that went indoors with the setting sun to a bustling mini-metropolis brimming over with the spirit of youth and the lifestyle choices that come with the demographic.

The microbrewery maven, who owes his encyclopaedic knowledge to the brewing guru, Dr S Cariappa, helped me get my basics right. The story of beer starts with double-row barley, which contains more sugar and less protein, and therefore is just right to produce an alcoholic beverage.

Much of this barley comes from Rajasthan and the biggest mandi for this grain is at Farrukh Nagar, not far from Gurgaon. Yet another beer landmark, also close to Gurgaon, is Pramil Jindal's Barmalt India at Jharsa Village, where barley from Rajasthan is converted into malt, following a process of drying the grains and letting them germinate, which is the next step to making beer.

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Beer is made by fermenting a malt extract in temperature-controlled, de-mineralised water and adding hops (dried flowers of the hop plant) - Amritanshu gets his five varieties from Germany - to create the bitterness without which a beer doesn't taste like one.

It's the percentage of the alpha acids in the hops that determines how "hoppy" a beer gets - in Amritanshu's case, the Mallerto Magnum (15 per cent) and Bobeck (9 per cent) adds the bitter twist; the Hersbucker (2.5 per cent), Saaz (3.5 per cent) and Tradition (4.5 per cent) lend it a distinctive aroma.

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On a round of the microbrewery in one squeaky clean corner of The Great Bear, Amritanshu explained the process to me. Coarsely crushed malt is mashed for three hours in water that is first filtered using the reverse osmosis process and then demineralised so that it doesn't affect the taste of beer. The next step is filtration.

The refined mash is boiled for 90 minutes and then transferred to a fermentation tank, where it rests for five to seven days at a temperature of 10 degrees Celsius. During this process, the yeast coagulates and settles down at the bottom, and the brew is moved to maturation tanks for 14 to 16 days so that it rests at 0 degree Celsius and improves with each passing day. At the end of it, you get wholesome unpasteurised beer with natural carbonation and a heavier body to enable it to roll languidly down your throat.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)