Indian single malt: Allied Blenders backs Aurangabad plant

Allied Blenders and Distillers is entering the Indian single malt category with an investment of up to 115 crore rupees in a malt distillery and maturation warehouse at Aurangabad, in Maharashtra.

The money goes into Minakshi Agro Industries, a subsidiary, and was approved by the company's management committee in mid-September. A crore is ten million rupees, so the commitment is a little over a billion rupees in total.

What the Indian single malt plant will make

Tropical maturation does in four years what a Scottish warehouse takes twelve to do.

The site is designed for about three million bulk litres a year, with maturation warehousing on the same footprint, and is targeted for commissioning in the third quarter of the 2028 financial year. That timetable matters more than it looks: malt whisky has to sit in cask before anyone can sell it, so a plant switched on in late 2027 produces a bottle to put on a shelf somewhere around the turn of the decade.

The board also signed off a further 10 crore rupees for a bottling unit and a distillery already approved, covering cost overruns the company attributed to higher metal prices.

A premium push after Officer's Choice

Allied Blenders is best known for Officer's Choice, a mass-market whisky that made it one of the largest spirits companies in India by volume and now reaches 39 countries. Single malt is the opposite trade: small runs, long waits, high margins, and a category where Indian distillers have spent the past decade proving that heat is an advantage rather than a problem, because tropical maturation does in four years what a Scottish warehouse takes twelve to do.

It also means competing at the top of a shelf that no longer belongs to Scotland alone. Indian single malts now sit next to Japanese and Taiwanese bottles in the same bars, while established Speyside names keep pushing further up the price ladder with limited releases.

Nothing about this is quick. The first spirit will not run until 2027 at the earliest, and the first bottle that matters will arrive several years after that, by which point the premium Indian whisky shelf will look nothing like it does today.