Talk to distillers. There are those who knew from a very young age, they would be going into the industry. Others have a midlife crisis and for some, like Nishant Sharma, it is a eureka moment, when suddenly everything becomes as clear as…well…a bottle of gin. Velo Mitrovich reports

There are two stories in this feature. The first is Nishant Sharma, founder and CEO of Edinburgh’s Rutland Square Gin, and his journey into spirits. Back in India, a great-grandfather, whom Sharma never met, fell in love with whisky thanks to a Scottish officer and a mutual love of moonshine.

After hearing about this ancestor, what could Sharma do but go into the spirits industry.

The other story is one of courage. What every craft distiller feels is fear. Do you have what it takes? What if you make the wrong decision? What if I don’t have the funds to go another month? What will this mean to my family, my children, all because I followed this dream? But few ever talk about this, pretending to be fearless and always confident.

A courage-shoutout should be put next to Nishant’s name because in this feature, besides the passion, he also talks about the lows, about having a heart attack at 34 due to the stress of being a distiller, and the big worry that this could all have been a wrong decision.

While Rutland Square Gin is a micro distillery, its story is epic in size.

The first time you might have seen Nishant Sharma was at 2022’s Imbibe Live B2B exhibition in London. His stand was tucked away next to the rear wall, and it would be a lie if you said he was drawing the same crowds as the large stands in the front, with their large staff, with their music pumping out, doing everything they could to should out: “Hey, we’ve got energy, just like our booze!”

Still, folks were stopping by, driven by curiosity, and if nothing else, by Sharma’s grin.

Rutland Square? Odd name for a gin. Oolong infused chai sipping gin? What is that, something from Starbucks? And a Scottish Asian distiller? Sharma was definitely holding the monopoly on that one at Imbibe.

You might have seen the suspicious look on people’s faces as they held the sample glass of Rutland Square and took a sniff. This look turned to realisation as they discovered, among the 13 botanicals, you could smell the tea. With the first sip taken neat, with its flavour not hidden by tonic, there was definitely the taste of white oolong chai. All of this was followed by grins and nods of their heads.

Not bad for some who, until recently, never distilled a drop of alcohol in his life.

No satisfaction

Why craft distillers leave the life of normalcy for one of spirits differs between all of the hundreds and hundreds of UK distillers. But if there is one underlining push, it’s a lack of satisfaction with what they’re doing. For Sharma, while this was the case, he just didn’t know what he was looking for.

He first worked for the Ashoka restaurant group in Glasgow and then for the next nine years he had worked in the banking sector in Edinburgh. It was a comfortable life with regular hours, a good income, an excuse to wear decent suits, and it provided a real security for his family. However, there was just something missing, that drive to jump out of bed in the morning and do something you loved. It was when he went back to India for a funeral that inspiration finally hit him like a tonne of bricks.

“It was at my grandmother’s funeral, where my grandfather sat down and started speaking about his father, who he has been inspired of throughout his life,” says Sharma.

Tej Ram was born into a humble family in Punjab, in northwest India. His father was a grain farmer and had a flour mill and that was their lives. You grow grains, you grind grains, and you sell it in the village.

But for Tej, it was not the life he wanted, he wanted adventure. He packed a bag, left two children and a wife behind, and set out, destination unknown. All he had to go on was hearing that there was a tea boom going on in the northeast of India; he decided to see if he could find his fortune there.

Travelling by steam train in the 1940s, it took him about four days to reach Assam and from there he went to the small village of Dibrugarh, which was surrounded by tea plantations – as it still is today. There was a strong presence of the British Raj in the region, with most involved in the tea industry.

What Tej had going for him was that when compared to many of the workers, he had an education and could speak English, making him valuable as a go-between for the labourers and British managers. He was made a forest officer and would lead a small team of people out every day to chop down trees. Through this job he met a Scottish officer who was in charge of security for the British lord who owned the plantations.

“They both shared a common interest, and that common interest was the love of making illegal moonshine,” says Sharma. “During these endeavours, they realised there was a gap in the Indian market and the gap was single malt whiskey wasn’t allowed to be sold to the common man – it was considered a rich man’s drink and only sold to the British upper class or people in the British army.  

“They had this lightbulb moment and decided the Scottish officer would buy single malt whiskey from the officer’s club – claiming it was for his personal use – but he would give this bottle of whiskey to my great grandfather.”

Thanks to Tej’s knowledge of grains, combined with his experience making moonshine, the officer and Tej started distilling whisky, which they added to it bottles of imported single malt whiskey, making Indian blended Scotch which they sold to the common man.

Hearing this story gave Sharma a sudden light bulb moment. He would become a craft whisky maker in Scotland and continue on the work of his great grandfather, in essence, completing the circle.

“This story changed my life for good, because it compelled me to take decisions I would have never taken in my life,” says Sharma.

But not whisky

After learning the story about his great-grandfather and returning to Scotland, Sharma was positive that whisky would be his future.

“But when I came back and spent six to 12 months doing research, I soon realised whiskey was out of my scope. I don’t have the millions you need to even set up a micro distillery, let alone not having any cash flow for at least three years as the whisky matured in casks and my life savings disappeared. I would have gone bust.”

Going back to the drawing board, he eliminated vodka – not being a fan – and decided then on gin. If he made real gin – juniper led with at least 37.5% ABV – but then used botanicals from India, Sharma figured he would be paying homage to both Scotland and India.

“I had been bringing myself up to speed on what gin is and how it’s made and thought: How do I contribute? How do I involve the city where my great grandfather and the Scottish officer met? There had to be a chai angle.”

As Sharma explains, in India and in most UK Indian households, ‘chai’ is the word used for tea. “If I am inviting you over for a cup of tea in my house, I would say: ‘Hello, come over for a cup of chai.’ Chai would be in the gin and part of the name.”

However, a problem he soon realised was, thanks to Starbucks, people associate ‘chai’ with flavoured chai lattes. What if people bought his gin and expected the Starbuck’s flavour to be in his gin? He would have to educate all his customers.

While at the time that might have seemed like a big problem, that was nothing compared to one he began facing as he started to work out his recipe. Going back to Assam for tea, he discovered there were hundreds of types of tea.

“I started going back and forth to India on tea missions, bringing back around 250 different variants. I never knew there were so many types of tea. There is green tea, white tea, black tea, blue tea, red tea – you name it and they have it.

“I bought back samples of everything that I could in small pouches and a backpack; I got stopped then by immigration wondering if I was bringing in drugs. So, I had to tell them the story of my great-grandfather.”

Early days on Sharma collaborated with Queen Margaret University and its distillation team in creating a recipe, plugging into a small government grant that pays for a distiller’s consultation. From 250 teas, he got it down to 50 to 60. More tasting and consultation, the number of teas came down to 10 to 15.

Sharma had already figured on most of the botanicals he wanted to use, using things like cinnamon, cardamom, and lemon peel. At that point, the recipe started being turned into actual gin,

“I would take it to my family, friends, and a few students from the University of Edinburgh for tasting. I would be coming home drunk every day due to all the sessions, until we finally landed on a recipe which everyone gave a thumbs up.”

There was one final tweak he had to give the gin. His family sipped whisky, they didn’t add mixers to it, so Sharma wanted his gin to be able to stand on its own and be a sipping gin. But, knowing that most people used gin as a cocktail ingredient, it also had to stand up to mixers and be palatable so restaurants and bars could use it.

“So, after a lot of back and forth, we found the final recipe which ticked all the boxes, and we create a choice all could live with.”

Which a course left the name.

If you have travelled to India since Modi became prime minister, you have experienced first-hand the hassles of getting a visa due to a tit-for-tat fight with the British government over visas. [It is even worse for Indians wanting to come to the UK on holiday with waiting periods of up to two years for visa approval.] In Edinburgh, where Sharma lives, the Scottish Indian Embassy is in Rutland Square. With the amount of time he was spending there, it seemed like a logical choice for his gin’s name. But there are those who disagree, seeing the name more as an insiders joke that 99 percent will not get. You have to wonder if something that sounded more Indian would be better.

Contract joy

Although Sharma has plans/dreams of having his own distillery sometime this year, in the meantime he is using the services of Edinburgh’s Summerhall Distillery which makes Pickering’s Gin – based on a Bombay recipe.

According to Sharma, he made a list of 10 distillers who provided contract distilling. But he found himself constantly going back to Summerhall.

“They’re close to where I live so I can just pop in, drop things off, or interact with them. Also, I met Matt Gummell, Summerhall’s co-founder and head distiller, he was a huge help.

“Matt is a very passionate distiller, he loves making gin, and was helpful in refining my recipe. There was a real synergy that was created, and though they are a big distillery, and we were a small contract for them, they never, never shied away from giving the service or the attention that we deserved. Most distilleries, they don’t entertain you unless the contract size is at least five figures. But with Summerhall, they were excited about what we were doing. They had a lot of suggestions and recommendations and that helped us pick the right distiller for us.”

While this partnership has worked out well for Rutland Square Gin, there are disadvantages in using a contract distiller.

“If I had my own distillery, I could buy everything in bulk and I could create a gin in huge quantity and can just leave it at the distillery until I needed to fill bottles,” he says.

Sells and marketing happens online for Rutland Square. Sharma says that he has five distributors lined up who believe in his journey and will be distributing it through their channels. He has around 40 Indian restaurants throughout the UK that make drinks with Rutland Square, as are Virgin Hotels.

“Every hotel which has an afternoon tea restaurant, they love our gin since it’s made with tea, so it is an easy sale.”

Trade fairs, both B2B and B2C can be really hit or miss, he has found.

Food festivals can be money losing propositions with people just sampling but not buying. Gin festivals, on the other hand, people come to sample and buy. Even areas can quite differ. In Glasgow, he’s found people just sample, while in Edinburgh, they’ll buy.

Money, stress and challenges

Sharma says that when you’re new into the business, you don’t get contracts easily.

“That’s why most start-ups fail, they start the journey, then then they run out of money.  They struggle to find money, and they have to close doors. This struggles it happens to me every single month, every month, we are at the edge of the door, a miracle happens, and we push for another month. I’ll be very, very honest, it has been like this since launching, it’s a month-to-month game. And it’s really hard. It’s not something I recommend people doing,” he says. “At 34 I had a heart attack, 34, brought on through the stress.

“You pick up staff that you hope share in your dream. They stay for three weeks and then don’t show up. Either something better has come along or just not willing to put in the time.”

Right now, he’s in the middle of raising capital to take the journey to the next level. He’s had a lot of interest from Spain, Germany, and Italy. He’d like to come out with at least two more flavours of gin, but that will take capital to develop. And all at the same time, Sharma is being faced with increased prices from bottles to botanicals. 

Depending on where you buy it, a bottle of Rutland Square Gin will cost you anywhere from £33 to £39. With increase prices for supplies, how much can Sharma pass on the costs to customers without losing them?

Although Sharma uses ‘we’ when discussing Rutland Square Gin, you have to wonder if he has a mouse in his pocket because he is pretty much a one-man band.

“I had a heart attack in March and had no business between March and May while I was recovering. That is a key man dependency. I, as all founders do, I am doing everything. I’m the salesperson; I am the design person; I am the stock manager.

“I’ve got a lot of roles within the company and…everything stopped. I then took a four week break just to clear my head, just to collect myself. It’s not easy for a 34-year-old to have a heart attack and then just move forward from it. It was a challenging time.

“I was in the hospital for two to three weeks, and I’m in there with these heart attack veterans, who have had three attacks. And I’m in my young 30s, you know when you feel invincible, and life will be long, and suddenly you realise that maybe it won’t be.

“The things that you had placed so much value on, as being so important, are they really? Are you wasting your life or are you doing what you really want to do?”

The smile returns to Sharma’s face. “But we still managed to stay afloat. There were family and friends who came together to help…you know definitely somebody’s looking after me from the stars.”