Region & History

In Bangalore, the story didn't begin with a distillery, but with a licence. J. N. Radhakrishna Rao Jagdale founded Amrut Laboratories in 1947, followed a year later by Amrut Distilleries Ltd. British colonial rule had just ended, and anyone wanting to produce alcohol in India needed, above all, one thing: government approval. Amrut initially produced so-called IMFL, Indian Made Foreign Liquor, spirits modelled on Western styles for a growing market.

For a long time, India had no law defining whisky by grain. Well into the 2000s, anything made from molasses-based alcohol, blended and coloured like Scotch, could legally be called whisky. Around 2004, roughly nine-tenths of what Indians drank as whisky consisted of this molasses spirit, which elsewhere would simply be called rum. Each state levied its own excise duty and set its own rules, a patchwork that distilleries still have to navigate today.

Amrut's owner Neelakanta Rao Jagdale flipped the usual order. On 24 August 2004, he launched his single malt not in Bangalore, but at an Indian restaurant in Glasgow, right in the heart of the Scotch whisky world. The gamble paid off: critic Jim Murray named Amrut Fusion the third-best whisky in the world in 2010, six years before a single bottle was even sold in India. In Goa, John Distilleries followed suit. From 2008, master distiller Michael D'Souza built a dedicated malt distillery there, the first distillation ran in 2009, and Paul John Single Cask 161 hit the market in October 2012.

What was once a footnote has become a race. Single malt's share of the Indian whisky market rose from 15 percent in 2017 to 33 percent in 2022, growth rates Scotch distilleries can only dream of. In 2025, the newly founded Indian Malt Whisky Association applied for a protected geographical indication meant to finally separate molasses whisky from true malt. Amrut and Paul John, once outsiders, are now the names against which this new category is measured.