In April 2026, at the Icons of Whisky Awards in London, Rakshit N Jagdale was given a Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted into the Hall of Fame. The award, organised by Whisky Magazine, recognised his 25-year role in building India’s single malt whisky category and turning the country into a serious force in global spirits.
The Managing Director of Amrut Distilleries had spent a quarter of a century proving that good whisky did not have to come from Scotland or anywhere with a centuries-old name attached to it.
The story of how he got there does not begin in a boardroom or a distillery. It begins with a student in the north of England, carrying small sample bottles of Indian whisky into curry houses and asking people to try them.
This is how Rakshit N Jagdale put Amrut and Indian whisky on the map.
A Bangalore Distillery and an Unusual Bet
Amrut Distilleries was founded in Bangalore in 1948 by J.N. Radhakrishna Rao Jagdale, in the year after India gained independence. For its first few decades, the company made its money in Indian Made Foreign Liquor and rum, the broad category of domestically produced spirits, and from 1962 it supplied the Indian military through its Canteen Stores Department.
Radhakrishna’s son, Neelakanta Rao Jagdale, joined the business in 1972 and took over as Chairman and Managing Director when his father died in 1976.
In the 1980s, Neelakanta made a decision that set the company on a different path. He chose to distil whisky from barley malt, which was unusual at a time when most Indian whisky was made from molasses. The early malt was blended for the domestic market, but the raw material for something more ambitious was now in the warehouses.
The warehouses themselves turned out to be part of the appeal. Bangalore’s heat means that maturing whisky experiences accelerated wood-to-whisky interaction, making the spirit take on character much more quickly than in Scotland.
Amrut’s former master blender (now Indri’s master distiller), Surrinder Kumar, has estimated that one year of barrel aging in India is equal to about three years in Scotland, and the spirit lost to evaporation runs at roughly 11 to 12% a year against around 2% in the cool Scottish climate. A young Amrut whisky could carry the depth of a much older Scotch.
Rakshit Jagdale’s Time In Newcastle
While studying for an MBA at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England, Rakshit set out to discover whether there was a market for Amrut’s malt whisky in the United Kingdom. Working under his father’s guidance, he turned the question into his thesis, a strategic plan for marketing Amrut single malt in Britain.
The research was hands-on. Rakshit imported duty-paid miniature samples of Amrut Single Malt Whisky from Bangalore and tested them in 85 Indian restaurants across the UK.
Breaking into Britain’s established spirits retailers would have been almost impossible for an unknown Indian brand, so he went where the product had a natural foothold, among restaurant owners and diners already open to something from India.
This was the slow, unglamorous part of the story, and it is the part most retellings skip over. There was no single dramatic moment, just the steady work of carrying bottles from one restaurant to the next and recording what people thought.
The findings were strong enough to convince the company in Bangalore to commit to exporting, and the academic exercise became a business decision.
Amrut’s UK Launch, Glasgow 2004
When Amrut was ready to launch, the company chose the one place where an Indian whisky had the most to lose. On 24 August 2004, Amrut Single Malt was launched at Café India in Glasgow, in the heart of Scotch country.
The logic behind the choice was set out by Neelakanta, and it was confident to the point of stubbornness. According to DNA India, Neelakanta said: “We were confident of our single malt. From a marketing perspective, we thought if our product had to pass the test, why not do so in the toughest location. Scotland is the home of Scotch. If they acknowledge our single malt, then that’s good enough for me.”
The local press caught the spirit of it. A front-page piece in the Scottish newspaper the Press and Journal on the day of the launch described the whisky as “tandoori meeting tartan” and reported that experts believed it could hold its own in a crowded market.
For a brand that had been carried around in miniature bottles a few years earlier, appearing on a Scottish front page was a statement arrival.
Amrut’s Blind Tastings: Standing Up Against Scotch
The harder task was changing minds, and the way to do it was to take the label out of the equation.
Across the UK, Amrut ran a series of blind tastings, pouring the whisky for drinkers and trade without telling them where it came from. The recurring result was that tasters compared it to Speyside single malts, the classic Scottish style, and were surprised when they learned it was Indian.
The clearest example came at the Pot Still in Glasgow, a bar well known among whisky enthusiasts. Rakshit later said the tasters there compared Amrut to a 10-year-old Speyside malt and were stunned to hear it came from India.
At such tastings, the whisky was poured against established Scotch names including Glenfiddich, Talisker, and The Glenlivet.
Rakshit has summed up why the approach worked. “The moment you remove the label, the bias disappears,” he has said. Stripped of the country of origin and the absence of a long age statement, the whisky was judged entirely on its flavor.
Jim Murray and the Wider World Get on Board
The blind tastings won over rooms one at a time. What turned the brand into a global story was the judgment of one influential critic. In 2005, Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible rated Amrut’s single malt 82 out of 100, an early signal to distributors and drinkers that the whisky was the real thing.
The bigger moment came in 2009, when Amrut launched Fusion, a whisky made from 75% unpeated Indian barley and 25% peated Scottish barley. In his Whisky Bible for 2010, Murray scored Fusion 97 points and named it the third best whisky in the world.
The ranking carried weight because Murray was known for his independence, and the industry paid attention to what his book said. Word of mouth became a verdict, and the Indian single malt had its proof.
Amrut’s Global Success and the Rise of the Indian Whisky Category
There is a detail in the timeline that says a lot about the whole strategy. Amrut launched in Scotland in August 2004, but it did not go on sale at home until 4 February 2010, when the company held a tasting in Bangalore. The whisky built its reputation abroad first, and arrived in India as a product the world had already taken seriously.
In the years since, Amrut stopped being the lone outlier. India now has a thriving single malt category, with distilleries such as Paul John, Rampur, and Indri winning international awards, and in 2024, the producers formed the Indian Malt Whisky Association to set standards for the sector.
Which brings the story back to the award in London. The student who once carried sample bottles into restaurants, asking strangers to taste an unknown whisky, stood on a stage in April 2026 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame for building a category that did not exist when he started.
The whisky he was selling had passed its toughest test in Scotland more than twenty years earlier. The recognition simply caught up with it.
Read the full article at How an MBA Student Took Indian Whisky to Glasgow and Beat Scotch at Its Own Game
