Photo: Bombay Duck Brewing
How a team of techies from India created an exciting new craft beer brand!
Today we are proud to introduce you to a team of young technocrats who decided to leave their promising and predictable corporate careers in the IT industry for the rough and tumble of entrepreneurship. Today TFN brings you the story of Harshit Thakkar who along with his friends, is the founder of an exciting new brand called Bombay Duck Brewing, and the story is as interesting as it is inspiring. The takeaway? You should never give up on your dreams!
Tell us a little bit about your early work life after graduation and what prompted you to become an entrepreneur?
All of us know each other from grad school at the University of Michigan. Being college students, we used to joke about starting a brewery someday so we would never have to pay for beer again but that plan got a little sidetracked after everyone graduated in 2008 and got jobs. We graduated in the middle of the recession and Sohil and Harshit worked briefly in New York before moving back to India while Rahul and Chinsi (read Abhishek, but we call him Chinsi) stayed back in the US. We had dabbled a bit in homebrewing in grad school but the big break came when Chinsi ended up moving to Dallas, Texas for a new job he started there in 2012. He rekindled the interest with a homebrew kit that was purchased online and brewed the first batch in 2012, shortly thereafter Chinsi discovered a local homebrew club, the North Texas Homebrewers Association and that’s when the hobby really took off. Weekends were spent brewing at friends’ backyards grilling barbecue and brewing beer by the poolside while the weekdays, in planning recipes in anticipation of the weekends.
What were the reasons you chose the business of brewing as your area of interest from your first venture as an entrepreneur?
Brewing for us started out as a hobby and it seemed like the obvious choice to try and make a living out of when we got bored of our corporate jobs. Call it a mid-life crisis or the burning desire to go stick it to the man after working most of our twenties in typical corporate jobs in tech consulting and finance. We decided to go down the route of setting up a brewery instead of a brewpub because we wanted to focus on making the beer and not running a restaurant, which is a completely different business in itself. The idea was to bootstrap and keep our overheads low till we could build enough traction with our audience.
What is the vision with which you set up Bombay Duck Brewing? And how did you come about the name?
Bombay Duck is a fish unique in flavor local to this part of the state and has been a part of the local community for a long time. Over time with the non-local, convenient alternatives like Basa – Bombil kind of started disappearing from our tables. The state of slow-brewed craft beer to us was the same when we entered the market. We have always been strong proponents of the locavore movement and wanted our brand to represent this ethos. Bombil or Bombay Duck was a perfect metaphor for us in that way. Local roots are part of how the community eats (in our case drinks) and a nod to the heritage.
What are your views on the current trends of beer consumption in India, and specifically what are the trends you see in the craft brewing industry with regard to quality and consumption?
The craft beer space is rapidly evolving in the country and a large part of it is driven by people who are foodies, interested in exploring new styles of beer that challenge the conventional perceptions of beer as being a bitter, pale yellow, fizzy instrument of intoxication. The focus on flavorful beer instead of strong beers is a big shift that we see happening slowly. We are starting to see a lot more craft beer-focused taprooms in the city having a couple of dozen beers on draft. A lot of restaurants in the city are also starting to focus on having a craft beer program as an addition to their bar offerings. The focus on consumer education has also increased a lot and the guests expect their servers to know their beers just as well as the wines or spirits. People are now more open to trying new stuff. With more microbreweries coming up the consumer choice is also increasing rapidly and there is something for everyone regardless of your personal taste preferences.
Tell us about your process of making, marketing, and selling your product. What were the top 3 challenges and how you were able to overcome them?
Making the beer is the easiest part of the entire cycle. With the brewery setup that we have, it is easy to manage to rotate about 3 to 5 styles of beers. Identifying the best beer to make and scheduling the batches was a challenge early on which we were able to figure out over the first three months of operations. We put agreements in place with our vendors to ensure timely and quality delivery. Today all ingredients arrive 24 to 48 hours prior to brewing a batch so we get to use the freshest ingredients to make our beer.
Marketing the beers and the brewery we rely only on Social Media channels because that is what is allowed in the alcohol space. We cannot market overprint or TV. We got in a friend to help with marketing and she has since day one been our north star for all things marketing. Setting the tone, context and the experience she brings is was something we are truly grateful to have
On the sales side, we have teams that work with restaurants to see the best fit in terms of beers and clientele that the restaurant gets to promote beers specific to that particular restaurant. We did not have connections in the F&B space about 5 years ago but now know most of the people. To build connections early on we used every friend, colleague acquaintance that we could to ensure that we get a meeting with the restaurant owners. Sales can get a bit easy if you know get to meet the decision-makers early on.
How would you compare life before and after Covid as an entrepreneur in your industry? Top challenges and opportunities.
Post-COVID, we’re definitely wiser but also relatively poorer! But this one really a black-swan once-in-a-lifetime event, so no one was really prepared for what was coming. One thing we’ve learned the hard way is to always be prepared for contingencies. We’ve become more selective in spending cash and our decisions are now driven more by how we can create a sustainable organization that can survive the turn of events. The biggest challenge is to survive through this period and think about how we can innovatively reach out to consumers who are looking out for our products. A couple of new regulations laid out by the Government certainly present opportunities for the future – we’re really looking forward to reaching directly to the consumers either through online/home delivery or retail stores.
Tell us a little about how you are fulfilling the market demand for your product and which locations in India you are currently available in.
Pre-COVID, we were present in 14 restaurants across Mumbai and 2 in Pune. At the moment, however, there are about six restaurants in Mumbai where consumers can have our beers – Woodside Inn (Andheri, Bandra, and Colaba), Leaping Windows (Versova), Hammer & Song (Cuffe Parade), The Little Easy (Bandra). Apart from this, we’re also doing Mumbai-wide deliveries through our online ordering platform – www.airmenus.in/bombayduckbrewing
What would be the ideal food pairings with each of your beers?
All the beers and the best pairings are available on our website – www.bombayduckbrewing.com
What are your future plans?
The future really depends on how COVID shapes up and hopefully there’s no recurrence of the virus. But from a mid-to-long-term perspective, we want to exploit the recent legislation that allows us to reach directly to customers by setting up retail stores. We’d like to create a strong foundation in the state of Maharashtra through this model before we look at going PAN-India.
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