A long shot

My friends call me a madman for taking this up,” Desmond Nazareth said with a laugh. “This” happens to the business of making alcohol. Not just alcohol, but the drink Mexico has legally claimed as its own: tequila. Through his brand DesmondJi, Nazareth has introduced the first locally-produced version of the Mexican drink that has the reputation of turning the hardiest drinker into a drunken mess.

With alcohol content ranging from 37 to 40%, tequila is not for the lily-livered. Drunk neat — chased by lime and salt — you can feel tequila burning through your sobriety from the moment it hits your throat. Good tequila has 100% agave and has been aged in oak casks for at least two months. Bad tequila is harsh and about as pleasant to drink as lighter fluid. Both, however, will leave you with the mother of all hangovers the morning after.

There’s also a mellow side to tequila, which is what drew Nazareth to the spirit. It’s the base for a number of
classic cocktails, including Juan Collins, Tequila sunrise and the Margarita. When Nazareth moved back to India in 2000, after spending 14 years in America working as a software engineer, he was struck by how expensive the ingredients for his favourite cocktail were. Since tequila is only made in Mexico — in the past, the country has threatened legal action against firms that use the word ‘tequila’ to describe their distilled blue agave spirits — and has to be imported to India, it’s price is exorbitant. Unwilling to give up his Margaritas, Nazareth began wondering whether it was possible to create a local variant of tequila. When he saw a photo of the blue agave plant that is the main ingredient of tequila, he was certain he’d seen the plant in India before.

He was right. As a child, he’d seen it while rushing across the Deccan plateau in a train. “Due to its sheer size and spiky texture, agave in India is mainly used for fencing purposes or for soil conservation,” he said. Armed with research and optimism Nazareth set up his micro-distillery in a 44-acre plot in Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, in 2007. The drink is bottled in Goa, Nazareth’s homebase.

It’s taken 12 years to figure out the spirit that looks like tequila, tastes like tequila but (legally speaking) isn’t tequila. The result is DesmondJi’s 100% Agave and 51% Agave. The other drinks in the DesmondJi repertoire are the first Indian-made Orange liqueur and blue Curacao liqueur (made from Nagpur oranges).

Almost as painstaking as establishing India’s first official micro-distillery was figuring out a name. The product could not be called tequila as it is a registered trademark of the Mexican government.  Nazareth wanted to brand the product “Maya”. “The ancient Aztec goddess of the agave plant is named Mayahuel. It would have been my way of paying homage to the Mexicans,” said Nazareth.

Sadly, the name was registered with someone else. Ultimately, Nazareth decided to stick closer to home and chose to name his brand after himself: DesmondJi. “DesmondJi is a name you either love or hate when you first hear it. But it’s hard to forget,” he said. The “Ji” was suffixed for fun and lends a cheery, Indian flavour. 

The name is also apt because of how completely involved Nazareth has been about every detail of DesmondJi, even the design of the bottles. At first glance, there’s nothing remarkable about them. A closer look reveals a flat back, which means the bottle can be put down horizontally on a surface without fear it will roll away. The distinctive design is by Reboni Saha, a Goa-based product designer. Nazareth wanted DesmondJi agbottles to be transparent, showing the clarity of the spirits. “The frosted blue Curacao bottle especially reminds me of the bottles filled with colourful liquids at ice gola stalls,” said Nazareth.

The real high, though, is DesmondJi’s pricing. The most expensive of Nazareth’s spirits is DesmondJi 100% Agave, which at Rs1,700 is significantly less than what you’d pay for a 100% agave tequila of similar quality. “All my products contain an alcohol percentage of 37.14% and are priced at a third of prominent tequila brands in the market. Quality-wise, they belong in the mid to upper range category,” he said. All other DesmondJi products are priced at Rs999, for 750ml. “Most people are afraid of playing around with their cocktails or home bartending because imported ingredients prove to be costly,” said Nazareth. For tips on how to experiment with cocktails, the website (desmondji.com) has links to unusual recipes, like Kala Khatta Mirchi Margarita.