SB meets… Anand Virmani, Nao Spirits
The co-founder of the company behind Indian gin brands Greater Than and Hapusa on scaling up with Diageo and why Nao Spirits ventured into rum.
*This interview was originally published in the November 2025 issue of The Spirits Business magazine.
How has Diageo’s investment helped the business?
Diageo came in three years ago with a minority investment of about 33%, and this June they took on 100%. When they first came in, the idea was to let us be, and almost act like a financial investor. The idea was always to be hands off, whereas now, they’ve taken a much more active interest. We’re looking at now getting access to their distribution network, which is one of the key strengths. I’m discovering there are lots of unlocks that we didn’t even realise existed, things like getting better credit terms, better deals with distributors that we were already working with. Now we’re part of a larger portfolio, it comes with some added benefits on the side, things like market intelligence. So we’re still unlocking what those benefits are.
Where’s next for global expansion?
Around 90% of our market is still India. We export to 24 countries, of which Italy, the UK, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, and Nepal are some of the bigger ones. The major unlock that I was referring to is in India. Each state in India pretty much behaves like its own country. India is a bit of a minefield, and we’re navigating that. We’ve existed for the past eight years, and every year the demand is just so much higher than what we’ve been able to supply.
Are you able to meet the current demand?
We did lots of things wrong in the beginning, but one of the things we got right from the get-go was over-investing in the distillery and capacity. So currently, we produce, on average, around 100,000 cases a year – so over a million bottles – but we have the capacity to go two times that. About 220,000 cases is what we should be able to do fairly easily. We have space, we have capacity, and we can grow.
Why did you move into rum?
A lot of businesses, especially in gin, start out with the intent of making whisky or rum, then end up in gin just because of cash flow. For us, it was the opposite. At Bar Convent Berlin in 2016, everyone was talking about how gin is done, and now the next cool thing on the market is going to be rum. We just got to the party and everyone was leaving. We knew that gin had not really had its moment in India. Whisky in India is over-indexed. Indians love whisky but equally they love rum. Rum has never been a premium thing in India, which is funny because we have the flavour palate. We’ve been exposed to a lot of rum, but is any of it craft rum? Is any of it good rum? That got us thinking that rum could be interesting, so we set aside some rum for ageing. About 18 months ago, we launched the rum, called Pipa, as an ode to Goa
and Portugal and how those stories are intertwined. Goa was a Portuguese colony for 400 years. We took jaggery spirit and matured it in Port casks from Portugal. It has the fieriness of an agricole with the richness of the wine cask, then we dosed it with a little bit of spice.
The UK-India deal will cut tariffs on imported gin. Does this pose a threat to Nao or could it help the category gain exposure?
It’ll be great if that happens. There was an initial kind of knee-jerk reaction that said, ‘Ah, but what about Indian-made goods?’
The reason consumers are choosing Indian-made craft gins is not because of the price. It’s more because there’s price parity. In most cases, it’s more to do with the quality and the story that we’re able to bring in. So if prices go down on imported gins, that’s great.
I’m hoping that it opens the door for more craft gins coming in, and for consumers having the chance to build a gin collection at home.
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