I have been pretty vocal about how much I miss having a ready supply of wine.  It isn’t that we drink a bottle every day, that we really need to have the top of the line selection in wine at our disposal, or that I won’t pay good money for a good bottle of wine. There are wines available, but they are limited in selection, and are easily twice the price of what I would pay for them at home.  I’m frugal, so I choose to make due with what we brought, and what our guests have gifted us with.  We limit ourselves to one bottle a week, and we still have a small stash, with more guests on the way!

Several people have told us that there are good Indian wines, some of them produced locally, but we have not found one that we liked (well, except the one that I had three huge glasses of on an empty stomach.  I won’t be touching that again), and most have been pretty bad.  So we choose beer.  Luckily, our “local” brew is Kingfisher, a well-known and mass produced beer that we had found to go well with Indian food.  We were amazed to learn that there are in fact seven different varieties of Kingfisher!!  Only four of them are readily available, and we have had a couple of skunky batches from two of those, so we are really limited to two slightly different types of Kingfisher.  Kingfisher is not a bad beer, we are just getting tired of it. We are looking for more variety in beer now too, and the imports that you can buy are less than inspiring.

We had hoped that there might be more locally produced brew, perhaps even a microbrew or two.  Historically there have been a couple of hurdles to the production of craft beers; the cost of the equipment, the treatment needs and variability in the water supply, and most importantly, the fact that the laws of the state didn’t allow it. These laws changed in 2011, and several groups applied to open microbrew pubs.  We began to hear about one of these from a friend, who heard from a friend that there was at least one microbrewery open.  A few weeks ago he let us know that he had visited, and pronounced it worthy.  There were indeed multiple beers on tap, and they were all produced in house.  They didn’t even sell Kingfisher!

We went on Sunday night with some other folks from our community.  Although only three of us drank beer, it was well worth the trip. We only tried two of the six varieties that they offer, but found them to be both fresh and tasty!  I think we have found our local.  Even if it is a forty-five minute drive from home, it’s local by Bangalore standards!