India is the only country in the tropical belt where the consumption of hard-liquor and beer is equal. In countries like Vietnam, the consumption of beer is much more than hard liquor, considering the climate, they said. Shenai elaborated that one of the reasons why India consumes so much hard-liquor is because of the psychology of the entire thing. “Urban India is very unlivable. One of the categories that IMFL gets its volumes from is the post-work, going-home period, where four people in different jobs would come together, sit at a small theka, enjoy that one breaks and go home.
And if you consider the transit time in cities, you have really small periods. So this moment of taking a break from your routine is really short. Hence the consumption style and pattern has also developed around this,” he said. India-Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) refers to all foreign liquors like whiskey, rum, vodka, and gin produced in India, excluding indigenous drinks like feni, toddy and arrack. India is really over-indexed on the 180 ml nips, they said. For the uninitiated, I80 ml bottles are called nips, 375 ml or half-bottles are called pints, and 750 ml or regular bottles are called quarts. Khaitan said that a paua or 250 ml bottle of semi-premium alcohol is usually the preferred choice.
“They will buy a nip, go to an ahata, finish the bottle and then head home,” said Khaitan. Ahatas are small, open drinking spaces, adjacent to liquor vents. “So if you have an hour, and you drink two beers, the high goes away faster, as opposed to a 180 ml nip,” said Singh. When Nikhil Kamath asked why India drinks, Suri said that the country-liquor drinking class drinks mostly because of the price-point and that they want to get high at the lowest cost. These have alcohol percentage ranging from 26-42 per cent. “Country liquor tastes good because of the low ABV,” said Suri. ABV or alcohol by volume is the metric used to measure alcohol content in a beverage.
“A typical whiskey would have 42 per cent ABV while a tharra would have around 28 per cent, so that you can drink it directly as opposed to a whiskey that needs mixers. Country liquor also has local flavours like orange and saunf,” he said. “Mass-level drinking is to get high quickly for the money that you spend. Their life is so tough, they would want to escape that,” elaborated Minakshi Singh.