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Paul John

A Bangalore company built a single malt distillery in South Goa, then launched it in London. The second Indian malt house to be judged abroad before it was sold at home — and the one that proved Amrut wasn't a fluke.

Goa
Cuncolim
Founded 1992*
~13 m

Amrut proved India could make a single malt worth drinking. Paul John proved it wasn't an accident.

The two stories rhyme almost uncomfortably. A long-established Indian drinks company, decades of unglamorous domestic business, a decision to make malt whisky properly — and then a launch abroad, years before the whisky went on sale to the people whose country made it.

Twice is not a coincidence. It is a description of what Indian whisky was worth at home.

The company, then the whisky

Paul P. John got a Karnataka distilling licence in 1992 and started the blending and bottling business that became John Distilleries; it took that name around 1995 and was incorporated as John Distilleries Private Limited in September 1996. For over a decade the company did what Indian distillers did — volume spirits for a domestic market that bought on price.

The single malt distillery came later, and deliberately: purpose-built in South Goa at Cuncolim, a few miles inland from the Arabian Sea and barely above sea level, with distilling beginning in 2008–09. The whisky then sat maturing for about four years before anyone outside the company could buy it — and when it was released in 2012, it was released in the United Kingdom.

  1. 1992
    Paul P. John enters the drinks business

    A Karnataka distilling licence, and a blending and bottling unit.

  2. 1996
    John Distilleries incorporated

    Bangalore. The renamed business becomes a private limited company.

  3. 2008
    Goa distillery begins production (2008–09)

    Purpose-built for single malt at Cuncolim, in the south of the state.

  4. 2012
    Launched in the United Kingdom

    Eight years after Amrut did the same thing, for the same reason.

Twenty years from a distilling licence to an international single malt — most of it spent on something else entirely.

The coast changes everything

This is where Paul John stops being a repeat of Amrut and becomes its opposite number.

Amrut matures its whisky up on the Bangalore plateau, where the heat is real but tempered by altitude. Paul John matures on the coast of Goa — a few metres above sea level, humid, and hot in a way that inland India is not.

Cuncolim, GoaPaul John — a few miles inland
13m
Bengaluru plateauAmrut — city elevation
900m
Elevation. Cuncolim's figure is the town's; the 900 m is Bengaluru's city elevation, not Amrut's distillery, which sits lower and outside the city.

Heat drives everything about tropical maturation: the spirit pushes deeper into the wood, extracts faster, and evaporates faster. Paul John says Goa's heat costs it about 8% of every cask each year, against 2–3% in Scotland, and that its whisky therefore comes of age three to four times faster than Scotch.

Those are the company's own numbers throughout. They vary between its own pages and its own staff, and nobody has measured them independently — the widely repeated "three times faster" is a magazine's framing, not a finding. Humidity also changes the character of the loss: coastal warehouses lose proportionally more alcohol and less water than dry ones, which is a different whisky at the end of it, not merely a faster one.

Neither house is doing the "correct" version. They are two different answers to the same question, and India happens to be big enough to contain both.

Indian barley, Scottish peat

The barley is six-row, grown in northern India — Paul John names Uttarakhand, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Its position is that the high fibre and protein content gives the spirit a distinctive tannic, fruity character. It is the same unfashionable choice Amrut makes, and for the same reason: the barley that grows in India is not the barley Scotland uses, and treating that as a defect would mean importing the raw material and losing the point.

The peat, though, is imported from Scotland — because India has no peat bogs worth the name. A peated Paul John is therefore a genuinely hybrid object: Scottish smoke, Goan heat. (Accounts differ on whether the distillery ships in raw peat and kilns its own barley, or buys peated Scottish malt.)

  1. 1Indian barleysix-rownorthern India (the distillery's own list)
  2. 2Scottish peatimportedfor the peated expressions only
  3. 3DistillationCuncolim, Goapurpose-built, distilling since 2008–09
  4. 4Tropical maturation8% lost/yrthe distillery's own figure
What makes the spirit Indian is the barley and the climate; the smoke is borrowed.
1992Company foundedincorporated as John Distilleries Pvt Ltd, 1996
2008–09Distilling sinceCuncolim, Goa
~13 mAltitudenear sea level, coastal
2012First soldin the UK

A note on the address

If you look Paul John up in most Indian directories — including, until now, ours — you will find it listed in Bengaluru. That is the company's home. The whisky is not made there. John Distilleries is headquartered in Bangalore and distils its single malt on the other side of the Western Ghats, in Goa.

It is a small thing, and it is the sort of small thing that makes a directory worth reading.

What to drink

See Paul John in the directory for location and visiting details.

Sources
  1. Paul John Distillery — official
  2. Indian six-row barley — Paul John (official)
  3. Paul John (whisky) — Wikipedia
  4. The Science Behind Why Goan Whisky Matures Three Times Faster — Whisky Advocate
  5. Paul John sets a new standard for Indian single malt — Forbes
Still to confirm
  • Maturation speed and the 8% annual loss are the distillery's own figures, published in its own materials, and vary between its pages. Nobody has measured them independently.
  • The four barley states appear only on John Distilleries' own marketing page; the distillery's other pages say only "north India".
  • Accounts differ on whether Paul John imports raw peat and kilns its own barley, or buys peated Scottish malt.
  • Distillery coordinates are approximate to Cuncolim, not surveyed.

We publish what we can source and say plainly what we haven't confirmed. If you work at Paul John and something here is wrong, we want to fix it.