ENSCONCED in plushness, sipping on craft cocktails at tony establishments, we might forget that we are part of the Hominidae, or the great apes, who foraged for millennia. Until our branch, the homo sapiens, broke away from the orangutans, gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees, and developed agriculture around 12,000 years ago. Ever since, we have been benefiting from the fruits of our labour. Foraging, however, has made its way back into our consciousness, spurred to some degree by chefs and restaurateurs devising innovative ways to address climate change. Besides working to achieve zero-waste kitchens through upcycling, a focus on local and seasonal produce, and offsetting their energy consumption, foraging has become, surely and steadily, one of the cleverer means of confronting this crisis. It isn’t surprising then, that in the last couple of years foraging has flowed into the process of crafting of contemporary cocktails on bars menus across the country as well.
Just recently, Nao Spirits, the Goa-based Indian craft gin distillery behind the Greater Than and Hapusa dry gins, hosted their first “The Forager’s Championship”. The event was held across Bengaluru, Delhi, Goa, Kolkata and Pune to honour and hone this developing area of mixology. “But the championship also speaks to Hapusa’s own creation journey,” explains Deeksha Kamath, the distillery’s brand manager. In creating their own category of Himalayan dry gin, Nao Spirits distils Hapusa using Himalayan juniper “sourced from near the snow line” of the Himalayas. These “dusty looking, rough around the edges, wild berries” lend their distinctive “pinewoody flavour” to Hapusa, says Kamath, handing us a bowl of these berries to check out during the cocktail championship. The seasonal, difficult to access nature of the Himalayan juniper contributes to “the core of the brand” being all about small batches.
Fifty mixologists from these five cities took up this challenge to incorporate foraged ingredients into their crafted cocktails. The first usage of cocktail as a term for an alcoholic beverage appeared in The Balance and Columbian Repository in 1806, when its editor Harry Crosswell answered the question, “What is a cocktail?” Since then, bartenders and drinkers have only pushed its possibilities beyond being “stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters”. Instead, the foraged ingredients in the championships went from the familiar — like jackfruit, wild limes, berries and honey, mango ginger, turmeric, jamun, pineapple, hibiscus flowers, kokum, wood apples, seabuckthorn, pandan leaves and black pepper — to those that were weirder and wilder both in provenance and their manner of being purposed into the cocktail.
Bichu buti or stinging nettles; buransh or rhododendron flowers; pirul or pink peppercorns (unrelated to black peppercorns); gandarayani, a medicinal pungent herb; and jimbu, a herb that tastes like cross between onions and chives from Uttarakhand were some of the more outre foraged ingredients. There was also white and red sandalwood paste, litsea leaves, karenda kai, Byadgi chillies, and pejakai (wild jackfruit) from Karnataka. Kadna, a herb traditionally used to treat fevers, found un Maharashtra; Gondhoraj lemons and Lau pata bata (or gourd leaf paste) from West Bengal; and lomba, a herb with a strong lemony fragrance; heiribob, a wild citrus fruit, piper chaba or piper chilli; aerma or khagi, a Indian varietal of sichuan pepper, from the North Eastern States. Even pumpkin, coconut and red spinach were integral to the construction of a few of the cocktails. All of these indigenous ingredients were transformed into tonics, tinctures, bitters, liqueurs, foams, sodas, brines, infusions and garnishes.
In order to arrive at employing these ingredients, each of these mixologists dove into their memories of loved ones, summer holidays or favourite dishes. This process of designing their cocktails seemed quite cheffy. For Marina Darik, who hails from Arunachal Pradesh and is a mixologist at Byg Brewski Brewing Company, it was important that her cocktail show “that foraging was fundamental to the way of life in Arunachal Pradesh”. Inspired by a steamed fish dish spiced with these tantalisingly numbing Sichuan-like peppers found locally in her hometown, she created the spicy, lemony “Forager’s Highball”. Darik served it up in a bamboo glass with a lemongrass straw “like the way we drink at home”. Sushil Kumar from Odisha, presently a mixologist at Umbaa Pub & Kitchen, “wanted to capture an essence of his mother” because he doesn’t get to see her often enough. Kumar’s heady, aromatic cocktail “Tea & Flower” brings together his mother’s favourite beverage, Darjeeling tea, and her favourite fragrance, rajnigandha or tuberose. LV Swaroop, a mixologist at Aqua in The Park, at 23 years old, was the youngest one in the championship; he remembered the mini bars of Mysore Sandalwood soaps from holidays in his childhood and turned red sandalwood paste into a bitter liqueur for its nutty hint to build his drink “Soundarya”.
Though powered by their past, the inventive use of these ingredients wasn’t simply to flex their skills. Instead, these potions were well-thought out, aiming to strike a balance between all the flavour tones of their concoctions. Like with mixologist Vardhan Chauhan of Bier Garten, who might have been partial towards walnuts from Himachal Pradesh because his “bua-ji would always send (him) back home with bagfuls”. But through trial-and-error “and the inclusion of basil along with walnut to infuse the Chardonnay” he achieved the goal of his cocktail: to bolster and bring out “the inherent deep, woody, earthy notes” of his base spirit. With foraged, indigenous ingredients being added into the mix, Indian bars and mixologists are having patrons return not just for their secret sauces but also for the stirring stories.