India’s premium spirits landscape is evolving rapidly, and few founders are as outspoken about its future as John Royerr, Founder of Ochre Spirits. From establishing one of Goa’s pioneering craft distilleries to building a beverage company rooted in transparency, conscious consumption and long-term profitability, Royerr is challenging conventional industry thinking. He represents a new generation of entrepreneurs who see alcohol not just as a product, but as a category that can be reimagined through quality, discipline and consumer trust. In this exclusive conversation with Best for Him, he discusses why India’s consumers are ready for better spirits, the realities of navigating the country’s complex liquor market, responsible drinking, business discipline, and his ambition to transform Ochre from a craft spirits label into a global House of Beverages built for the next decade and beyond.
- Goa-based, craft spirits, first micro-distillery ambitions in India. That’s a lot of firsts for one brand. Where does the confidence come from that India is ready for this, and not just in South Goa?
The confidence comes from the drinker, not from us. We watched the market for years before we poured a single bottle and what we saw was a generation of Indian consumers who had already arrived at a place the industry had not caught up to yet. They were reading back labels on gin bottles in Goa bars. They were asking bartenders about botanicals. They were reading back labels on gin bottles in Goa bars. They were asking bartenders about botanicals. The confidence is that we know exactly what we are building, we know exactly who we are building it for, and we are prepared to play this over a decade not for funding cycles. The brands that define a category are never the ones that arrive when the market is obvious. They are the ones that arrive when it is not yet obvious and stay long enough to make it so. That is precisely where we are and precisely where we intend to remain.
- You came from the beer industry. Making that jump to hard liquor isn’t just a product shift. It’s a different consumer, different distribution, different conversation entirely. What did you underestimate?
When you have spent close to a decade and a half inside the industry, watching how distribution actually works, how trade relationships are built and broken, how consumers behave when no one is marketing at them, the surprises are largely already accounted for. You do not walk into spirits from beer with wide eyes. You walk in with a map that has most of the dangerous terrain already marked.
That said, the excise architecture in India at the state level is in a category of its own. Not because it was unexpected but because the degree to which it is a living, breathing strategic constraint on every single decision you make is something you only fully appreciate from inside it. Pricing, state entry sequencing, channel selection, working capital cycles, the excise system does not just sit alongside your business model. It shapes it. Every state is essentially a separate business with a separate P&L, a separate approval timeline, and a separate set of relationships to manage. We activated three states in a single quarter post our November funding. That sounds like momentum but it is the kind of achievement that tests the entire operational infrastructure simultaneously.
The consumer though, I had no surprises there. The Indian drinker who drinks with intention is exactly as sophisticated, as curious, and as willing as I believed they were when we started. That conviction has been validated at every level. Everything else in this business is hard. The consumer has been consistently, reassuringly ready. Which, ultimately, is the only surprise that would have actually changed anything. And it went exactly the way we expected.
- Ochre markets itself to health-conscious consumers. Low calorie, real fruit, no sugary mixers. But alcohol is alcohol. At what point does wellness-focused spirits branding become something you have to be careful about?
We have never told anyone that drinking Ochre products will improve their cardiovascular health. We have not suggested that our rum is a post-workout recovery beverage. There is no Ochre campaign that implies your daily protein intake is covered, your fibre goals are met, or that you will wake up more hydrated because you chose us over someone else. If that copy exists somewhere, I would very much like to see it because we certainly did not write it.
What we have said and will continue to say without apology is that the ingredients in our bottles are real. That we use actual macerated fruit for the flavours. That we do not add colouring to make the liquid look more impressive in the glass. That the botanicals in our gin were chosen with the same rigour a chef applies to a menu rather than a procurement team applies to a cost sheet. That is not a wellness claim. That is a transparency claim.
The honest position is this: alcohol is alcohol and we have never pretended otherwise. What we are is a craft spirits brand that refuses to make a bad product worse by cutting corners on ingredients. If someone is making the choice to drink, they deserve to know that what is in their glass. That is the entirety of our position.
The wellness-washing conversation is a real and important one in food and beverage. It just does not have much to do with Ochre’s alcoholic line of beverages. We are in the business of making spirits that are genuinely better than what most people have been drinking and being completely honest about what that means and what it does not mean. The question of where wellness branding crosses a line is worth asking. Just not of us.
- You’ve said your spirits are designed to be enjoyed neat or with sparkling water, no mixers needed. That’s a bold ask in India where most people still drink whisky with soda or rum with cola. How do you actually change a drinking habit?
The mixer culture in India did not emerge from preference. It emerged from necessity. When the dominant spirits on the shelf for decades were harsh, aggressive, and left you with a chemical burn rather than a finish: you needed something to bury it. A full glass of soda. A generous pour of cola. The mixer was not a choice. It was a survival mechanism for the liquid that preceded it. That is the honest origin of Indian mixer culture. Not tradition, not taste preference, not a deep cultural attachment to whisky soda as an intrinsically enjoyable combination. It was compensation. A workaround. The consumer masking the shortcomings of the product because the product gave them no other option.
What happens when the liquid is actually good? When the rum has genuine character from real macerated fruit? When the gin has botanical complexity that reveals something new in every sip rather than a chemical sharpness that demands dilution? The mixer becomes optional. Not because we told the consumer to drink differently. Because the product no longer requires the mask.
We are not trying to change a drinking habit. We are trying to make it unnecessary. There is a fundamental difference between behaviour change as a marketing mission and making a product that the behaviour changes on its own. We are firmly in the second camp. The consumer who tries Ochre neat and reaches for the soda out of habit will put the soda down after the second sip. Not because we told them to. Because the liquid told them to.
- The seed round led by Ah! Ventures marks Ochre’s shift from craft startup to what you called an emerging beverage house. Those words carry a lot of weight. What does the business look like three years from now if things go right?
Let us start with what a House of Beverages actually means because it is not a marketing line and it is not an investor pitch device. It is an operating philosophy and it changes every decision the business makes. The House is not defined by what it makes today. It is defined by the standard it holds across everything it will ever make. The category is a vehicle.
And for Ochre, the vehicles are many. On the alcoholic side, Rum, Vodka, and Gin are already in the market. Agave and Whisky are on the line for launch in FY27. On the non-alcoholic side a premium Cocktail Mixer range is launching alongside functional waters. Hydration, energy, fibre, and protein beverages built for the drinker across every occasion, not just the drinking one. That breadth is not diversification for its own sake. It is the House expressing itself fully across every moment a consumer reaches for something worth reaching for.
That trust is not category-specific. It is House-specific. And it compounds over time in a way that no single-category brand ever can. That is not an ambition. That is the architecture. Everything we build every category we enter, every market we open, every expression we launch is designed to reinforce that architecture rather than expand away from it. That is what we mean when we say House of Beverages. And that is why the words carry weight.
- Men’s relationship with alcohol is complicated. It’s social, it’s pressure, it’s often not really a choice in certain environments. Ochre positions itself as a conscious brand. But do you think conscious drinking is a real shift in behaviour, or is it mostly a marketing category?
Conscious drinking for Ochre is not a product positioning. It is a brand responsibility and we take it seriously enough to have built campaigns around it rather than just putting it on a label. We ran a Holi campaign this year that said exactly what it needed to say: have a good time, but the colour you throw should be the one in your glass, not the kind that ruins someone else’s day. Simple idea. Non-negotiable message. The response told us everything we needed to know about whether the consumer was ready for a brand that spoke to them like an adult rather than a liability disclaimer.
We have spoken publicly about toxic masculinity and mental health in the same breath as craft spirits because we genuinely believe they belong in the same conversation. The man who drinks because he cannot process what is happening inside him is not our consumer, not because we do not care about him, but because we care about him enough to say that the glass is not the answer to that problem. Ochre is for the man who has done that work, or is doing it, and now drinks because he actually wants to, not because he needs to.
The philosophy is straightforward. Have the best possible time. Be completely present for it. And do not under any circumstances make your good time someone else’s bad one. Do not drive. Do not pressure. Do not perform. Do not become someone in a room that other people have to manage around. Your enjoyment is entirely your right. The moment it encroaches on someone else’s safety or comfort or mood, it stops being enjoyment and starts being something else entirely. That is the line. It is not a complicated line. But it is one that the industry has historically been too commercially cautious to draw clearly. We are not.
Drink with intention. Own your behaviour. Leave every room better than you found it. That is what responsible drinking means to us and it is the only version of conscious drinking we are interested in building a brand around. Ochre does not make spirits for one gender. We make spirits for anyone of legal drinking age who wants to drink honestly.
The question was framed around men. The answer belongs to everyone.
- You mentioned PAT as your key metric over revenue. That’s a rare stance for an early-stage founder. Where did that discipline come from?
It came from watching what happens to brands who do not have it. The startup ecosystem has spent the better part of a decade celebrating revenue as the primary proof of progress. Grow the top line. Show the chart going up and to the right. Worry about the bottom line later, that is a Series B problem, a Series C problem, a problem for when you are big enough that efficiency becomes the narrative. The consequence of that consensus is a generation of well-funded businesses with impressive revenue numbers that have never interrogated whether a single rupee of that revenue was actually worth making.
Revenue allows performance. You can construct a revenue number that looks like a business while running something that is quietly consuming more than it creates. PAT does not allow that fiction. Every rupee of profit after tax is a rupee the business genuinely earned after the government took its share, after the team was paid, after the cost of every bottle that left the warehouse was accounted for. There is nowhere to hide in PAT. Which is precisely why it is the metric that matters.
A business that celebrates revenue in this category without interrogating the structure underneath it is not building a company. It is building a liability with a good Instagram feed. The discipline came from a simple belief that a business exists to create value, not to create the appearance of value. PAT is the only number that tells you which one you are actually doing. Everything else is a story you tell on the way to finding out.
- India has strict advertising regulations on liquor. You rely on sampling events and digital content. That’s a narrow channel for a brand trying to go national. What keeps you up about distribution?
The answer to the distribution problem in India is not a clever channel strategy. It is patience, relationships, and a product that earns its place on every shelf it lands on. The rest is execution. But let me address the actual question underneath the question because the advertising restriction is the more interesting constraint.
Surrogate advertising in India is a genuinely creative problem. You cannot show the product. You cannot show consumption. You cannot associate the liquid with any aspiration that a regulator might construe as encouraging drinking. What you are left with is brand building through everything that is not the advertisement, the event, the experience, the bartender, the content, the conversation, the cultural moment. And here is the thing that the industry treats as a limitation but we treat as an advantage, that is exactly how the world’s most enduring spirits brands were built before mass media existed. Word of mouth, trade advocacy, earned cultural presence. The restriction does not narrow the channel. It forces you into the channels that actually build durable brand equity rather than purchased attention.
Sampling events are not a narrow channel. They are the highest-conversion channel in spirits. The consumer who tastes Ochre at a curated event has a completely different relationship with the brand than the consumer who sees a banner ad. They have a memory, a flavour association, and a personal experience that no digital impression can replicate. We convert at a rate that most paid media cannot touch, because the liquid does the work that the advertising cannot.
On distribution specifically, the honest answer is that the model that worries me is not ours. The model that worries me is the one that relies on advertising spend to compensate for a product that cannot hold its own in a glass. We do not have that problem. Which means every outlet we enter, we can hold. Every shelf we land on, we can defend. And every reorder that comes through is proof that the distribution is not just wide, it is deep. Width comes with time and capital. Depth comes from the product. We have the depth. The width is a function of runway. That is the only thing that ever keeps a distribution conversation honest.
- You’re looking at Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, the Middle East for expansion. That’s a lot of markets with very different drinking cultures. What’s the one that scares you the most?
Fear is what you feel when you do not understand something. Respect is what you feel when you understand it completely and recognise that it will not bend for you. South Korea falls firmly in the second category.
The Korean drinking culture is one of the most sophisticated, most ritualised, and most brand-loyal in the world. Soju is not just a spirit, it is a social operating system. The way it is poured, who pours it, who receives it first, what it means to refuse: these are not customs around drinking, they are customs around hierarchy, relationship, and belonging. A foreign craft spirits brand walking into that market without a deep and genuine understanding of that culture is not entering a market. It is wandering into a conversation it does not have the vocabulary for.
The Middle East is complex for obvious regulatory reasons but complexity is manageable. Singapore is sophisticated but accessible and the cocktail culture is internationally fluent and Indian craft has genuine cachet there right now. Thailand is a volume market with a clear premium segment that is already receptive to craft imports.
- Health technology and men’s wellness is changing how people think about what they consume. Sleep trackers, metabolic monitors, gut health apps. Do you think that’s going to help or hurt a premium spirits brand? People are becoming more data-driven about their bodies.
The health technology wave does not hurt premium craft spirits. It eliminates the competition below us. The brands that survive it are the ones that were always honest about their ingredients because the consumer who tracks everything is also the consumer who investigates everything. When they look at what is in an Ochre bottle they will find exactly what we said was there. That is the only answer that matters when the data-driven consumer comes asking.
Let us be honest about where the science actually is before we let the technology run ahead of it.
The clinical literature on alcohol and metabolic health is genuinely incomplete. The studies that exist are contested, the methodologies are inconsistent, and the conclusions shift with each new cohort. We do not yet have a rigorous, longitudinal, peer-reviewed consensus on what moderate alcohol consumption does to sleep architecture, gut microbiome diversity, or insulin sensitivity in a healthy adult who also exercises regularly, eats well, and manages stress. The data simply does not exist at the level of precision that a continuous glucose monitor or an Oura ring implies it does. The technology is running at a speed that the clinical research has not come close to matching. And until that research catches up, and it will take decades, not funding cycles: anyone claiming certainty about what a Friday night gin does to your metabolic score is selling a narrative, not a finding.
That consumer is not going to stop drinking because their health app gave them a yellow score. They are going to drink better, and care significantly more about what is in the glass when they do. That is not a threat. That is our entire market thesis stated back to us in biometric data.
- This one might be uncomfortable. Craft spirits in India have had a complicated track record. Several brands launched with big ambitions and quietly faded. What’s your honest read on why, and what makes Ochre different? And please don’t say “quality.”
The honest read is simple. Most of them were built for the launch, not for the long game. A beautiful bottle, a compelling origin story, a strong first season in Goa and then the slow discovery that Indian craft spirits is not a sprint with a photogenic finish line. It is a decade of working capital management, excise compliance across twenty-eight different state frameworks, distributor relationships that take years to build and minutes to lose, and a consumer who needs to find you consistently on the shelf before they decide you are worth trusting. Most brands were not built for that reality. They were built for the press release.
The ones that faded confused a moment for a movement. Goa in December is not the India market. A viral launch is not distribution. A beautiful bottle is not a business.
What makes Ochre different is not what we have done in the first two years. It is what we designed before we started. A House of Beverages architecture built to carry multiple categories, multiple markets, and multiple consumer occasions simultaneously. Institutional capital deployed against working capital depth, not marketing noise. Distribution built for reorder velocity, not outlet count. And a complete absence of interest in being the most talked-about craft spirits brand in any given quarter. We are not building for the next round of funding. We are building for the decade. The brands that define a category are never the loudest ones in the room. They are the ones still in the room when everyone else has moved on to something else. That is the only game we are interested in playing.
- If Ochre the brand disappeared tomorrow, what would you want it to have stood for? Not the products. Not the revenue. What’s the thing underneath all of it?
RE: With respect, the premise deserves a challenge before the answer.
Ochre is not disappearing tomorrow. Or the day after. Or in a decade. So the hypothetical, while philosophically interesting, is not one we spend any time on. We are not building a brand that requires an obituary to articulate its values. We are building one that makes the question irrelevant by still being here when it gets asked.
That said, underneath all of it, if you stripped away every bottle, every label, every market, every number what Ochre stands for is the refusal to be ordinary when ordinary was the easier choice. Every decision we have made has had a simpler, cheaper, faster alternative. We made the harder choice every time. Not because it made us more profitable in the short term it made us less profitable. But because we believed that the consumer who drinks with intention deserves a brand that operates with the same intention. That the person who takes the time to ask what is in their glass deserves an honest answer. That craft is not a price point or a font choice or a story on the back label. It is a discipline that runs through every decision you make when no one is watching.
That is what sits underneath all of it. The discipline. The refusal. The quiet, absolute commitment to doing it properly even when doing it improperly would have been completely undetectable. Ochre will not disappear. But if it ever did, that is what we would want people to remember. Not that we made beautiful bottles. That we never once made an easy one.
