Prime Venture Partners Podcast

Narayan Manepally’s Journey of Building Geist Brewing Co. |From Ex-Intel Engineer to Craft Beer Icon in India

Prime Venture Partners: Early Stage VC Fund

What happens when a techie starts brewing in his garage and ends up building one of India’s most iconic craft beer brands?

Just as refreshing as Geist’s beer, this episode has Narayan Manepally, CEO & Co-founder of Geist Brewing Co., chatting with Sanjay Swamy.  It has all the flavours and ingredients - from sharing his journey as an Intel engineer in the U.S. to innovating and succeeding as a beer entrepreneur.

What you’ll learn:
🍺 How one batch of California Golden Ale changed everything
📜 Why Narayan brewed in Belgium and brought it back to India
📦 The science of building a cold chain for beer
🌳 How Geist Brewing Co.  turned adversity into an open-air beer garden
📈 From 0 to 450+ locations without compromising on quality

Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction


03:27 – Tech at Intel → Garage Brewing


08:09 – First Brew = The Big Idea


10:08 – “Now They Say: We Love Geist!”


12:42 – What Makes a Beer ‘Craft’?


15:00 – Brewing Abroad When India Said No


18:04 – The 600K Month & Scaling B2B


20:33 – COVID Pivot: Sell to Myself


23:47 – Cold Chain & the Science of Fresh Beer


34:03 – Advice for Founders

📌 Follow us:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/primevp
Twitter: https://twitter.com/primevp_in
Website: https://primevp.in

🔔 Subscribe for more founder-first content.

#GeistBrewingCo. #CraftBeerMovement #StartupIndia #FounderInsights #EntrepreneurMindset #RegulatoryChallenges #B2BtoB2C #FoodAndBeverageIndustry #ConsumerBranding #ScalingStartups #BootstrappingStories #COVIDPivot #BusinessOfBeer #FounderPodcast #PrimeVenturesPartnersPodcast

Speaker 1:

I just wanted to brew beer and open a microbrewery. We were earning $600,000 in a month. Bangalore is the capital of craft beer in the country and this is like a billion-dollar industry. The homebrewing industry is massive, really smart engineers. Everybody brewed beer in their home. You're allowed to make 30 liters of beer free without a license, as long as you don't sell it. Beers are categorized into two main buckets there are ales and there are lagers. Ales typically use top fermenting yeast. Lager strains typically tend to stay at the bottom in order to produce the same beer over and over and over again. That takes skill, it takes experience, it takes dedication. It takes, you know, it takes tech. We have to thank Vijay Mallya and Kingfisher. So we said let's call it Kama Sutra, because it just sound like Kama Sutra. It has to go from passion to persistence to profitability. At the end of the day, it's about making somebody feel really good when they drink a glass of beer.

Speaker 2:

Hi again, welcome to the next episode of the Prime Venture Partners podcast. And I have with me a friend and what hopefully will be a very special episode, my dear friend from school. We've had several names for him, but his official name is Narayan and for today's show I shall call him Narayan. No, I'm actually going to call you Nari. I can't call you anything else. But my dear buddy from St Joseph's Boys High School and college and, through life, known each other for the better part of 50 years Scary to say that Seriously. But most importantly, now he is the star co-founder and owner of Geist Brewery microbrewery Star. Really, I have to say something polite, and we're going to talk here a little bit about his journey from a little kid that I knew him to becoming an engineer, working overseas, coming back to India and eventually starting up what for many years was his passion project and converting it into a business Guy's Brewery and Nadi. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Our audience here are largely tech entrepreneurs, so we will bring in a little bit of how tech is involved in the making of beer and the managing of the business. So maybe we can start a little bit with you telling us about your early days and slowly, over a period of time, you know where you studied, where you worked, and we'll come down to the the beer part later on yeah, so I left to go to the us in 89. Tell us from school oh, from school.

Speaker 1:

So I'm born in mysore, uh, brought up in bangalore. That's when I met you at school, at St Joseph's Boys' High School, which feels like an eternity now, by the way. It feels like just the other day, if you ask me Easy for you to say Sorry, I'm sweating as we talk because it's kind of warm today, but anyway, perfect time for a beer, absolutely so. After school I went to BMS. I did my PUC at St Joseph's. Went to BMS because I flunked the IIT exam. I couldn't get in.

Speaker 2:

And then that's two of us.

Speaker 1:

Seriously, but anyway so. And then finished BMS, headed to Virginia Tech for my master's, but anyway so. And then finished PMS, headed to Virginia Tech for my master's, and there in the computer science department was this absolutely amazing technology called DBI, that stood for digital video interactive. And I was looking at this computer screen and it was like a walkthrough of a Mayan cave. And so somebody had taken a camera and put it on their shoulder and they had kind of taken a picture step by step and they had stitched these pictures together and so you could actually walk through this entire cave. And again, if you looked at the far right you could see the little ant, and if you clicked on it you could hear the ant's chirp or the sound and the genealogy of the ant. It was just absolutely fascinating stuff.

Speaker 1:

And it was that moment I decided that I somehow have to find a job at this place. And they were based in Princeton, new Jersey. It was an Intel department, so Intel had sponsored this technology, and then it was a little research group called PRO, the Princeton Research Operation. So I stayed with my sister, who was not very far away from there, sent my resume in and then I got called for an interview After many, many days of trying, and then there were five people over a whole day of interviews and I got hired and I was just like the most brilliant set of people I've worked with in my life. Just absolutely amazing, anyway. So I worked on a bunch of different things. Then one day our legendary CEO at that time, a person called Andy Groh he came in and all of the work that we were doing in PRO, which is a Princeton research operation, was all non-real-time stuff. So you would take a video, you would compress it with an algorithm and then you would play it back by decompressing it on hardware.

Speaker 2:

This is early 90s we're talking about.

Speaker 1:

This is 1991-92. And he came in and he said what?

Speaker 1:

is all this bullshit, non-real-time stuff. I want something in real time. And he came in and he said what is all this bullshit, non-real-time stuff? I want something in real time. And he had this thick Hungarian accent, just this amazing human being, anyway. So he told us this, gave us this mandate and basically told the team and said I want you to use as little hardware as possible and I want you to start moving as much of the processing power onto the native processor on the CPU. And so the team worked on a bunch of different things, but the algorithm guy started working on something called NSP, which is native signal processing, taking away HOSPA from a digital signal processor, which is a DI-based DSP. And me and another guy called Peter were given the role to figure out what real-time stuff can you create. And so we came up with the idea of a video conferencing system. So we actually worked on this and it worked. It was actually fascinating because you could send audio video and you could share text and all the stuff that you can do on Zoom today. We had it working in 1993 and andy showed that at the intel sales and marketing conference in 1993 in front of 2 000 people, and I remember backstage. He comes by, he stops, he looks at me and says this had better work. And then he goes in straight to do the presentation and we had linked IJKK, which is Intel, japan, princeton and Andy sitting in Arizona, and it worked and he absolutely loved it and he said, okay, we're going to create a real product out of this.

Speaker 1:

And so the entire thing shifted to the Intel Communications Group in Portland, oregon, in 1993. I was shifted to that, to that division, and started working on stuff. I mean, it's hard. It's hard to say this now because I was the only indian guy in my group and today what? 35 of intel, maybe more, is indian. But um, I started working on this and then everybody in my group again a a bunch of really smart engineers. Everybody brewed beer in their homes, because in Oregon you're allowed to make 30 liters of beer free, without a license, as long as you don't sell it, and this is like a billion-dollar industry. The homebrewing industry is massive.

Speaker 1:

So I got into this thing. I went to brew beer with my guy, with my friends, got, you know, made a few batches of beer, fell in love with it and started building a little brewery in my garage and then started brewing and then added every single bell and whistle because you know you always thought you bring in more technology, your beer is going to be better. Nothing can be further from the truth. Nothing worked, basically, but anyway put in every single bell and whistle that you could think of in my home brewing system and kept brewing beers. But one day I remember, and that was probably one of the days, that inflection point, as they call it, where I made the decision to come back to India.

Speaker 1:

So my cube mate and Intel is this cubicle desert? Right, it's just gray cubicles for miles and miles and miles as far as the eye can see. So in my nine by nine cubicle, jeff and I were cube mates. So Jeff said, hey, let's go. It was a Friday afternoon, it was bright and sunny, which is rare for Oregon. It's always raining. So he said do you want to go get a bite to eat? And I said, great.

Speaker 1:

So we went to Hillsborough, which is is downtown, and then, finished on wheel, came out and we saw this board called main street homebrew, and so he looked at me and says you want to go back to work? I said, now, let's just go in there. So we walked in there and there's a guy called kevin, who was a phd in microbiology, who quit his job to start a homebrewing store because he loves craft beer and and he gives this big gyan about you know how do you make this and you know what do you do. And we were fascinated, I was just like completely enamored by this whole thing. And literally $65 later, walking out with buckets and tubes and raw materials and stuff, and we go straight to my house to brew a batch of beer and we brewed it. Obviously we skipped work.

Speaker 1:

And then, many weeks later, jeff tells me and says, hey, I've invited a bunch of friends to come and try our beers. And I'm like you know. So we had followed all the things that kevin had told us to do. And then I said, man, this is going to be crazy. You know, you're not going to be able to. We can't serve this beer, it's going to taste like shit. And he's like it's only friends, don't worry about it.

Speaker 1:

So I went the local store, picked up a bunch of craft beer, put it in the refrigerator and then, when the friends came, I actually remember we had this Coca-Cola keg, the Cornelius keg, and I put this little plastic coupler on top of the keg and I had a little plastic tap and I poured the beer into the glass and the beer was fantastic.

Speaker 1:

It was just fantastic. So that was a moment I said I have to go back to India to do this, because every time I come to India and you know, when you're in your late 20s parents are really worried that if you hit 30, then all the good looking women or the good women will kind of disappear. So I had this intense pressure to get married and I would come every year to meet women to get married to. And then every time I came back to India, the only beer available was Kingfisher, and so when I made this California Golden Ale, it was just brilliant and I said, yeah, we have to take it back and do this. So that was the moment I decided to go back to India. What they didn't tell me was every subsequent batch of beer that I brewed after that tasted like shit.

Speaker 3:

But anyway.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, the good thing is I came back here and didn't quit. And you know, when you enter a new business, you always have this, you know this rose-colored glasses view of the world, saying I'm going to go change the world and do this. And it's excruciatingly difficult to do business in a regulated environment. But we've built something. And I think what is most satisfying to me, sanjay, is seven years ago when somebody asked me and said what do you do? And I said I work for Geist. And they'd say what's that? And then I have to go to lengthy tirade about craft beer and this and this and whatever else. And now when I tell people I work for Geist, they say, oh, we love your beer, so we've done something right.

Speaker 2:

Wonderful, Wonderful. Maybe for the novices including myself, what are the different types of beers that are there? And when you use the term craft beer, what does that mean, etc. Maybe you can give a quick view of the land here.

Speaker 1:

So broadly beers are categorized into two main buckets. There are ales and there are lagers. So ales typically are brewed at a higher temperature with a different kind of yeast strain and the fermentation time is about 14 days. With the lager, it's brewed with a lager strain of yeast and it's brewed between 11 and 17 degrees and it's brewed for a much longer period of time, between 21 and 25 days. So the mouthfeel, the taste are very, very different in both the beers. One is a lot more rounded, a lot more mouthfeel in the ales and in the case of lagers you have a much kind of crisper, drier beer that you can get on your palate. Now, that said, that's the main two categories, right? But today ales are being made like lagers and lagers are being made like ales and they use ale strains to make a lager and lager strains to make an ale, and so the distinction between these two categories are also kind of becoming blurred. But generally these two still stand.

Speaker 1:

It's easier to explain to the layman, but if you really want to go technical about it you'll have to say the two main categories of beer are beers that are fermented. Top fermented yeast are used and bottom fermented yeast used for the beer. So ales typically use top fermenting yeast. So when they ferment they are pretty much at the top and once they're done fermenting they drop to the bottom. Lager strains typically tend to stay at the bottom. So if you want to classify beers at a very general level, it's ales and lagers. But because the lines are blurred now between ales and lagers, you can say the two main categories are bottom fermenting yeast, beers made with bottom fermenting yeast or beers made with top fermenting yeast.

Speaker 2:

Got it. And then what about? You know you talked about craft beer versus other problems.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I guess the definition of craft varies from country to country, person to person, and everybody has an opinion of what craft beer really is. To me, craft beer is everything that the people say, which is you know, smaller batches, more variety, independently owned. You know the owners of the business have greater than 50 percent, say, in the business. You know they don't produce huge volumes. So there's a. There's a, there's a cap on the number of liters that are produced every year. There's also provenance Right. So, for example, if your beers are made from Bangalore, that's itself one of the checkboxes for craft, I think.

Speaker 1:

To me, craft is about using your knowledge, wisdom and experience to make something great, right, and at the end of the day, it's about making somebody feel really good when they drink a glass of beer. And so that takes skill, it takes experience, it takes dedication, it takes, you know, it takes tech, uh. So you have to be technically skilled at what you do in order to produce the same beer over and over and over again. Anybody can make a good batch of beer, like I found out when I made the california golden ale, uh, and then every good batch of beer, like I found out when I made the California Golden Ale and then every subsequent batch of beer was terrible, but it takes skill and knowledge and experience to get this product out consistently that effectively makes customers feel great about it.

Speaker 2:

Wonderful. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that journey, where it was this passion project to becoming a mainstream business of yours, journey of you know, where it was this passion project to becoming a mainstream, uh, you know, business of yours, right, and you sort of bleeped over probably what was 20 years and you said, oh, and then I started guys, and people said what is guys trying to explain? But, um, just that journey and that path for you know, discovering that this is really what you wanted to do as a full-time, you know activity, uh, because you could have always, you know, shared the, you know the formula with someone and, you know, had the manufacturer you chose to actually make this thing. So how did that come about? And I know, in the middle you were also working very closely with your father's factory in the automotive parts space, et cetera. So a little bit about that phase would be good to hear about as well.

Speaker 1:

So when I came back, when I came back, I just wanted to brew beer and open a microbrewery, and every place that I went to they said oh, microbrewery laws don't exist, it's illegal to do this. We cannot allow you to do this. And, by the way, I went and met politicians and you know how it is right the demands for stuff.

Speaker 2:

Actually, I don't know how it is, but let's not go there, so anyway.

Speaker 1:

So the thing is. So we came back. I wanted to open a microbrewery. Laws didn't exist. I had all these beer recipes that I had made and friends of mine and mentors of mine said hey, you know what? You've got these recipes. Why don't you take these recipes, get it made abroad and bring it back to India? Because you can't get a license to manufacture or start a microbrewery. So that's what we did.

Speaker 1:

So we took our recipes, went and met brewers in Germany, brewers in Belgium, and worked with them. And then I remember this one particular instance with this Belgian brewery. This brewer called Javier and he kept saying Narayan, it's about controlling yeast, controlling yeast. And I couldn't quite understand what he meant and what he was saying. But I you know, I understand the depth of what he was trying to say now but anyway. So we got our beers made there, brought it back to India and not being finance guys, we didn't realize that we were literally wrapping 50 rupee notes across every bottle of beer that we were selling. So we weren't making any money.

Speaker 1:

But it was actually fascinating because we started working with the excise department. We understood how to make a cost card. We actually had our own transportation company, so we were selling our beers through our own little trucks and tempos and whatever else across Bangalore. So we understood quite a bit in that whole process, right. We understood excise, we understood warehousing, we understood transportation. We understood a bunch of things. Of course we weren't making any money. In parallel we kept continuously working with the excise department, as did a few others, and the person who got his license first for a microbrewery was a guy called Arvind Raju at Beer Club. So he got his license and soon thereafter all the others started opening up. We got involved with two microbreweries, brewski and Big Brewski. Oh, in those days it was called Brewski and Big Brewski. And I have to tell you, the first time in my life I felt like a rockstar because this thing was wildly, wildly successful and between these two outlets we were earning $600,000 in a month and you know your gross margins are 67%. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is absolutely amazing. And then people kept saying at these breweries they would say love your beer, hate the Bangalore traffic, please make this available closer to where we live.

Speaker 1:

Now the structure of breweries in Karnataka and most states in the country is microbreweries are not allowed to distribute beyond premise. So whatever you make, you have to sell within your four compound vaults. The big breweries are making beers in huge volumes, right, but they were not making the kinds of beers or they couldn't make the kinds of beers that customers in the urban areas wanted to drink. So we said, okay, so what if we set up this distribution craft brewery is what we called it where we had a big brewery license but we made small brewery-like beers, and that was the first time ever in South India that anybody tried this experiment. So we did it and we were supplying kegs b2b to outlets across, and I remember, you know, when we started.

Speaker 1:

The first keg went out august 5th 2017 and, um, it was to a place called locals diner in kamenahalli, and I could tell you the pride that the entire team felt about going there and drinking a glass of it was like, oh think, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Subsequently, we've grown. We are in multiple cities. Now we're in Bangalore, we're in Telangana, we're in Pondicherry, we're in Mahe and this year we'll probably be in two other states. So we're doing this slowly.

Speaker 2:

All right, so now you're in. You said five states. Four states Four states, states and how many locations?

Speaker 1:

again 450, 450 locations now, this one is the original this is the og one, yeah, yes. So this actually was a covid baby for us, because we started the business 2017 we're primarily b2b business, supplying kegs and then I remember we got our last payment march 14, 2020, 2020, and everything stopped after that and we're all completely shell-shocked because we're completely on trade. So, by the way, the business in beer if you go to a restaurant and drink at the restaurant, it's called an on-trade business. If you go to a wine store or a shop and you pick up your beers and take it home, it's called an off-trade business.

Speaker 1:

Now our business in 2017 and for the next couple of years was all on trade and this business completely dried up, and so I had no idea how deep, how far, how wide, how long this is going to be, and the only objective I had was save the company and don't fire any employees, because I just didn't feel it was humane to let people go. And you kept hearing all these horror stories of people just being let go because people didn't want to pay, and I said we're not going to do that right. And so I was sitting up late nights wondering, scratching my head.

Speaker 1:

People didn't want to pay, people didn't have any money, money to pay true, maybe that's true too, but you know, maybe maybe there were some that did have the money and didn't want to pay because they won't deal with it. Whatever right. But the point is we decided we're not going to lay anybody off, and I'm proud to say we didn't lay a single person off in the entire covid period. Uh, anyway. So at this point in time I was scratching my head, saying how do we keep this business alive? And I came up with this story in my head that said listen, if I can't sell to anybody, let me at least sell to myself. And so I wanted these two beautiful trees here One's a banyan tree and one's a people tree and I'd always had this desire of setting up a beer garden underneath these two trees, because that's absolutely magnificent.

Speaker 1:

And the Karnataka government has a policy called the refreshment room, which effectively means that any brewery or winery that makes product can have a sampling room or a tasting room. Uh, you know, in their premises. What they didn't tell me was that they wouldn't allow you to do it in open air, and so I spent multiple weeks, months, trying to convince the department, saying listen, this has to be open air, you can't do this under a closed roof, and so I went and worked with government officials in the Vidhan Sawda trying to get this beer garden open, and also got permission to create this concept of a growler. It's a two liter jug, you know. I should probably get you a sample. You want to see it have?

Speaker 3:

you seen what a growler is?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'll get you one. Can I get a sample of a growler? So, anyway, got this permission to allow for these growlers to be defined by Karnataka excise and for these growlers to be taken away from here. Because I was telling people hey, you know, if people are going to come to the beer garden, many of them don't have the option of going anywhere else because many things are closed. Allow people to take it from here. And they agreed. So we started this in 2020. And what we also didn't realize at that time was this is an amazing brand building tool for us. You know, people come, they connect with the brand, they see a clean toilet, good food, good beer, good ambiance and they feel more connected to the company. And we had hoped that this would translate to better beer sales when we introduced our can, and that actually turned out to be correct. So in 2020, we actually introduced cans that would go out to the retail stores. Nice, so between the cans and the kegs, we are in 250 locations.

Speaker 2:

So this is what. So this was your innovation. This is the growler, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And then we also got this modified to create a crowler, which is a canned growler, canned version of this, and yeah so, but do you know why it's called a growler? No, okay, so in the UK when people would make beer in community breweries and take it home, they would take it home in these pails and apparently when they walked, you would hear a growling sound. That was made in the pail and that's how it came to be called a growler. So that's what it is.

Speaker 2:

So let's step back a little bit and talk about some of the extraordinary use of tech and IoT and things like that that you sort of innovated here a bit as well, and I remember when we talked you would talk a lot about ensuring that the temperature is perfectly done and the transportation that you could measure and you knew exactly where the beer was in the delivery, etc. Transportation and you could measure and you knew exactly where the beer was in the delivery, et cetera. From the logistics side of it. Some of it is really cold chain related stuff, right, but you kind of went of course, with your tech background. I guess you know you're much more positively inclined to trying out some of these. Since our audience is kind of a tech audience, I'm sure they'd love to hear you know where the true sort of hardware, hardware, software and tech, iot stuff goes into play.

Speaker 1:

here, my guiding light has been the Arrhenius equation. The Arrhenius equation was created by a Swedish scientist called Savante Arrhenius, who in the 1800s, by the way, to his credit.

Speaker 2:

I know you did not learn this in 6th standard.

Speaker 1:

I did not learn this in 6th standard and I didn't learn it in chemistry. I can tell you that yeah, but the Arrhenius equation? Anyway. So Arrhenius equation Savanty Arrhenius was the first person in the world in the 1800s to predict global warming and he's the first person in the world to actually quantify the rate of reaction in a liquid. And his equation is very simple. It says for every 10 degree rise from a base of 20 degrees, the rate of reaction in a liquid doubles.

Speaker 1:

So for us, we knew that if you expose beer to heat, something bad is going to happen.

Speaker 1:

We don't know, and still don't know, what actually happens inside a keg or a can when it's kept warm, but it doesn't taste as great as it does, so something bad is happening to the beer. So we came up with this, because we use this as a guiding light. We said, listen, let's just keep our beers cold end to end. So we wanted to make sure that, obviously, from the point of brewing, through transportation, through dispensing at the customer side, everything is kept cold. What it also taught us is that in our country the cold chain infrastructure is not going to scale. So if you want to build this business end-to-end cold chain you'll remain a niche business, but our objective is to make this beer available to as many people who can drink it or who want to drink it. So it also taught us what beers would degrade even less. So it also taught us what beers would degrade even less right, and how do you use tech to make sure that it is exposed to the least amount of heat, even if you're not using toll chain transportation right.

Speaker 1:

So what we did in the beginning was the first thing we did was we said, hey, we need to come up with an ERP system, because there is no beer brewing ERP system that exists. So we actually wrote our own. So we worked with a local developer and we built one from scratch, and that actually turned out to be good, because we're at least we have a fair idea in terms of how the business is doing our purchases, our inventory, our you know, mis, our excise reports, everything. Now that's the backbone of what we do Now. When we sent our beers out, every truck has a GPS system, so that's not a big deal. Every truck you can also do the least cost routing. But one of the things that we developed with the early logistics provider was this, which is, every location that we supplied beers to in the beginning were all geofence. So when the truck reached the geofence location, a trigger would go to the cloud saying the truck has reached, and then the guy would then have to take the keg out and then take it and load it into the cold box of every single outlet that was buying our beers, and then he would take a picture of the barcode that was on top of the keg and that was another top of the keg and that was another signal to the cloud. So the delta t between when the truck reached to when the guys took the picture and lured in the cold box was the time it had taken that the beer was exposed to heat. So we tried to minimize that as as much as we could right, because my big fear was that you know somebody's going to keep a keg on the ground, take a smoke, take a leak, whatever right, and it will actually be sitting on the sidewalk and that was not a good thing. So we decided that we're going to implement this tech to make sure that we have as little exposure to heat as we can. You know, it's also interesting because we had these big, huge stainless steel refrigerators where you had three kegs on the top and three kegs at the bottom and customers bought that reluctantly because we refused to supply beers to anybody that didn't have these refrigerators. And then people kept saying you know what? This is a really ugly box. I don't want to keep this in my beautiful bar. And they were right. So how do we solve this problem? Because people don't want to keep this and at the same time we want to keep our beers cold. So we said, okay.

Speaker 1:

So if you look at how draft beer is dispensed, so you've got a keg and into the keg you push CO2, which is inert gas, and the beer gets drafted out of the keg through a pipe, right, and it comes to a chiller and it's called a beer chiller, or think of it as a flash chiller. So the beer goes through a series of coils that's enveloped in ice and by the time it comes up to the tap, right, the beer is cold. It comes up to the tap, the beer is cold. But to keep that tower, which has all these taps on it, cold, the central part of that chiller is all cold water, and so there's a little impeller that keeps rotating to keep no ice from being formed and that cold water gets pushed up to the top of the tower to keep the entire tower cold. So you minimize even the beer that is sitting in the tower, right, you want to keep that also as cold as you possibly can.

Speaker 1:

Got it. Then we said you know what? Wait a second, there's cold water and it's only being used to keep the tower cold. What if we use that to actually keep our kegs cold. So we innovated on this thing called the keg sleeve. So it's like this little jacket that you put around the keg that has these little pipes going around it and the cold water from that chiller actually circulates through right the keg sleeve, it keeps the cold from the outside also.

Speaker 3:

Exactly exactly.

Speaker 1:

And, of course, when people have multiple kegs, there wasn't enough pressure from the pump, so all we had to do was replace the pump and put in a high-pressure pump, and that seems to be working okay. So we're able to keep our kegs cold up to 10 degrees even without a cold box. Very nice, Very nice. And so, like I told you earlier, you can't scale this business if you're end-to-end cold. So we will be going into what we call ambient craft in the next couple of months. So we will be going into what we call ambient craft in the next couple of months, and for that the tech there is and this is the hope and the dream is to use as much AI as we can to minimize the amount of time that our cases of beer are sitting in a Karnataka government people.

Speaker 1:

So, we want to optimize the supply chain as best as we can to ensure that we know exactly what beers are sitting in the retail outlets. So the way it works for a can is this. For a keg, by the way, we can send a keg directly to a restaurant, but for a can or a bottle it has to go through a Karnataka government depot. So you typically send product to the depot. It sits there and all you can do in hope and praise is people are buying your beers quickly. The longer it takes, the more heat it suffers, right, and so typically what happens is that the, the retailer, the wine shops, will come to the depot, pick up your beers, take it there and keep it in his outlet and keep it cold generally. But with the amount of time that is sitting in the depot, it's exposed to severe heat. So you want to minimize that exposure as best as you can, which is what we're working on right now.

Speaker 2:

Wow, very cool. And do you have like a tech team that's working on all of this stuff?

Speaker 1:

There's nobody inside who's tech. We work with a bunch of partners on the outside. So even the ERP we develop with somebody on the outside and we work very, very closely literally every week, working with them, as we are doing now to improve our ERP. We've got a bunch of tech partners who we work with to get this done.

Speaker 2:

Very nice, very cool. Can you talk a little bit about the rest of the team and how the company is set up? And we have other friends also who are involved in the business.

Speaker 1:

So Mohan, our classmate, is involved. He's my business partner, so he's pretty much CEO of the company. Unfortunately he's not doing very well health-wise so he's taking a backseat right now. But so there's Mohan, who's our classmate. Before Mohan was actually Paul, who I started this business with another classmate of ours and Paul is, you know, half Bengali, half German, full-time hippie right. So he wanted to travel the world and whatever else. So he helped very, very world and whatever else. So he helped a lot.

Speaker 1:

And, by the way, this entire factory was built by Paul, so the entire layouting and everything else. His German sensibilities have come into the picture and hopefully you'll see some pictures of that too when you're there. It's really nicely organized and I look back and I say, wow, the guy really put some thought into this. So, um, and in German style, you know, the factory is laid out in three strips. The one strip is a utility strip, but all the utilities are there so it can be easily serviced. The middle strip is a brewing strip and the fermentation strip and the. The third strip is your is your, is your finished goods and your raw material strip. So basically that. So it so, basically that. So his thought process was to minimize as much of this, what he called spaghetti movement in the factory.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, so that's Paul. We have a VP of sales and marketing who takes care of all of the sales and marketing across the entire country. We have a brand person, a brand team. We have an HR team. We have a factory manager who runs all the operations logistics, etc.

Speaker 2:

How big is the entire team?

Speaker 1:

So today, geist is 280 people, of which 80% of it works in hospitality. So we have three of these of our own outlets, and the remaining 20% is basically brewing and what we call corporate.

Speaker 2:

So the brewing team is probably like 50 people.

Speaker 1:

No, no, no, no, no, it's 14, no, no, 10 people. Sorry, what am I saying? 10 people.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's really high, yeah, our you know revenue per employee. If you think about it that way, yeah, quite amazing, quite amazing. So, you know, tell us a little bit of your views on the consumer mindset and the culture and how that has evolved. And we've seen articles about, certainly in India, bangalore is the number one beer city and it's one of the top beer cities in the world. Now, how has that evolved over the past couple of decades and what are you seeing on the horizon? Yeah, and what are you seeing on the horizon?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I think I mean, by the way, bangalore is the capital of craft beer in the country, right? So the excellence that you get here for craft beer, in my opinion, still is miles ahead of any other state that is there in India right now serving craft beer. Bangalore. To me, I've always defined this as a California of India, which means all trends are set here, that kind of percolate to the rest of the country. Um, so people here.

Speaker 1:

By the way, we have to thank vijay, malia and kingfisher to set up this entire draft culture in the city in the first place. Right, it was because of him that he he actually got concessions the government and and convinced the government that draft beer should not go through a government depot, it can be sent directly to the outlet, and that has obviously helped people like us and many other companies. So we have to thank him for the work that he did but that created this whole beer culture in in our country. That that, uh, coupled with the fact that you know there are so many people working in IT in this country who obviously have this hunger for knowledge, not just in their own line of work but in every aspect of life that they encounter. There's just this thirst and hunger for knowledge, right, and people just want to be a better version of themselves every single day, which is amazing, right. And then I see more in Bangalore. Of course it's happening now. It's percolating the rest of the country, but in Bangalore this is where it all started, coupled with that where people have traveled all over the place. So you'd have these techies who would go to every part of the globe to work, experience the culture there, drink the beers there, and they came back and they kept asking the question why can't we have the same beers here? Right, and that's a that's a trend.

Speaker 1:

Fortunately, we saw happen quite early. Another trend that I saw happen quite early is people wanted to drink better and eat better, you know. So this whole thing about organic food, putting better things into your mouth, um, especially for people who could afford it, right, better food, better food for their kids, better beverage for their kids, less sugar, lower gluten, lower carbs all that stuff kind of started happening many, many years ago, and then COVID just accelerated that trend, right? So when COVID happened, I think people started seeing their mortality saying, oh my gosh, you know, I have no idea how many years I'm going to be alive, so let me do the best that I can for myself and my family, and so that accelerated the trend. So now what we are seeing is this definite trend towards premiumization definite trend.

Speaker 1:

So people are spending money and saying, listen, I don't need to drink a lot of beer, but if I'm going to drink, let me drink really good beer and I don't mind spending a little bit more money for it. Now, yes, still, 85% of the beer sold in our country is strong beer. That goes into rural areas, but the trend of premiumization so just to give you a small statistic right Growth of premium beers is at like 30 to 40%. The growth of mass market value beers is like 10%, 7 to 10%.

Speaker 2:

But on a higher base. On a much higher base.

Speaker 1:

Right is like 10% 7% to 10%, so clearly on a much higher base, right. But there is a growing number of people who want to drink better, who want to eat better, willing to pay more money for it, and so that has helped Geist and for us. We've been absolutely obsessed with quality, and I don't say this frivolously, I say this because we really mean it. I mean the amount of testing and the amount of agonizing that we do over our beers is, you know, is a lot, and so we hope that that can effectively translate to the fact that we get to be known, or continue to be known, more and more, as you know, from a good beer to a great beer, to an amazing beer.

Speaker 2:

So well, that's the serious side. You know, there's always an extraordinary sense of humor when you go about naming your beers, yeah Right. So who's the genius behind that? It can't be you for sure, Just kidding. But you know every one of these has some you know really cool names and would love to take a photograph of your the menu in the video but yeah, I would love to hear.

Speaker 1:

I think it's a team effort. It's a team effort. We actually use this opportunity to get the team involved in naming of the beers right, and so some of the most creative names have come from the team.

Speaker 2:

Of course, some came from me, but in the early days, maybe after a few beers.

Speaker 1:

Maybe after a few beers. Yeah, and in the early days I remember more than I talking saying you know, people don't know about craft beer, so we should actually have the name or the style of the beer in the name. So Witty, wit, wit is a short form for wit beer, so it's a Belgian wit beer. Wit is a short form for wit beer, so it's a belgian wit beer. And we couldn't think of anything else. So we said let's call it the witty wit because it's intelligent, right, and so that was one. The uncle dunkel, uh, is a dunkel, is a dark beer. Dunkel means dark and this was a dunkelweizen. But we said if you put dunkelweizen in the beer it's going to be like you know too much for people to say we just we call it dunkel even though technically, technically, it should, it should have been dunkelweizen, but anyway. So uncle dunkel just sounded nice.

Speaker 2:

We just I'm gonna, it's gonna be my new nickname, uncle dunkel and then the ipa was my was my naming because it was.

Speaker 1:

We used something called citra hox in the beer and I couldn't think of anything else. We said let's call it kamas Citra because it just sounded like Karma Sutra. So the belief is that good things will happen when you drink an IPA.

Speaker 2:

So the Karma Citra was there, I think you're having a good time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and then one of the agencies we worked with for our branding and for our graphics we had just introduced the Stout and they came up with the name called stouter space Right. And then one more person who was who was with us is who's now moved to Canada Akhil Nair he named. We have the smoked wheat beer which, by the way, won a silver award at the European beer star, and be the first brewery yes, yes, I saw the photograph on your home page first brewery in the countries to win an award in that in that competition, which is very nice.

Speaker 1:

So akhil named that beer uh, and a smoked beer. Smoke in german means rauch and he came up with the name.

Speaker 2:

Rauch a fella, yeah so, yeah, awesome, awesome, all right. So now you know, beer making has gone from your passion project to being a business. What is your next passion project?

Speaker 1:

yeah, yeah, consuming it no, I think, for me. You know, people say this is a passion project, but I would also tell you this one thing what I've learned is the following any project that has to be successful has to go from one P to three P's right. It has to go from passion to persistence to profitability right. So these three things are crucially important If you're going to be successful in business, because a lot of people start off with passion, like I did, and you know what, if you don't pay attention to the bottom line, you're going to get screwed right. So make sure that you pay attention to the details of your money, understand where your money is coming from and where it's going. And the last thing is this it is excruciatingly difficult, especially in our country, to do business. Everybody knows this. I wish it was easier, but it's difficult and, by the way, it's no different in many, many other countries in the world. You just have to have persistence and grit to get that done.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, on that note, nari, just before we wrap for today, maybe some of your looking back and some of your key takeaways and advice for the younger version of yourself or for new entrepreneurs starting out, what would you? I mean, you had some golden nuggets right now, but generally, so, yeah, for me it's the three Ps.

Speaker 1:

It is literally passion, persistence and profitability. Pay attention to the money. And everybody, by the way, says don't quit. I think that's largely correct, right, even though there are so many times in your life you wanted to say you know, screw it, it's just too much, I just can't do this anymore, there's no money, um, it is too much of pressure, I just don't want to do this anymore. But those are the moments when you decide and say stay on right, I have this, this, this deep belief.

Speaker 1:

I'm not religious, I'm spiritual, but I call it the hand of god.

Speaker 1:

And my, my, uh, my belief has always been this that if you're fighting every day in the trenches, fighting the good fight, a light will appear that effectively shows you and says that's the direction that you go.

Speaker 1:

And I think the one saying that has kind of guided me through troubled waters was a saying from Narayan Ramachandran, my mentor and a good friend, and he said entrepreneurship is about being in business long enough till the lightning bolt strikes and you have no idea which way you're going to go. You think you're going to go there, and I remember telling myself and saying oh, by the way, when I go, it's going to be choppy waters and I'm going to be in a boat and it's going to be tough. What the reality of that was is it wasn't a boat, it's a coracle, it's choppy waters and you're spinning as you're going down these choppy waters and you have no idea where you're going. But just kind of figure it out, be there, stick with it, it'll all work out. And India is the 10-year rule. Any business that is built, it's going to take 10 years to build.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. And look, thanks, so much Amazing words to end on, and look forward to seeing the progress of Geist over the coming years. Congratulations for everything you've done here.

Speaker 3:

Dear listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast app for free and you'll be the first one to know when new episodes are available. Just search for Prime Venture Partners Podcast in Apple Podcast, spotify, castbox or however. You get your podcasts, then hit subscribe and if you have enjoyed the show, we would be really grateful if you leave us a review on Apple podcast. To read the full transcript, find the link in the show notes.