Jai Ho! The resounding A.R. Rahman composition from the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire played as Narayan Manepally, CEO of Geist Brewing Co. and Vidya Kubher, the brand’s head brewmaster, collected the Gold Award at the European Beer Star 2025 competition in Nuremberg, Germany, in September. This wasn’t the first rodeo for the Bengaluru-based distribution craft brewery. In 2024, they won the silver for their light amber smoked wheat beer, Geist Rauch-a-Fella. But winning the gold in a competition judged through a rigorous two-day blind tasting was a different high.
“We won the gold in the South German Hefeweizen Dunkel category for our beer, Geist Uncle Dunkel,” Manepally, 62, shares. “This is a category that has been dominated by the Germans for decades, so to beat them at their own game felt incredible. We were treated like royalty,” he recalls. Since winning teams get to pick the song they want played as they go up to the stage, Jai Ho felt like a natural choice. Seeing India on the list of winning countries, Manepally says, was a particularly proud moment.
We are at the Geist production brewery on Old Madras Road, sitting in the facility’s craft beer garden, which doubles as a restaurant. Surrounded by greenery, the open-air format of the place makes it ideal for unhurried conversations. Besides the pleasing aesthetics, this 15,000 sq. ft location is significant because it houses their distribution brewery where all the beers in the brand’s portfolio—Witty Wit, James Blond, Weiss Guy, Kamacitra, Stouter Space, Repeat, Repeat Strong, Uncle Dunkel, Wheat The People and Pop Fiction—are produced. It is also the facility from which the brand’s kegs and 500ml cans (crowlers) are transported to the states Geist is available in.
Geist beers are currently available “on tap” in 300-plus outlets across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, West Bengal, Puducherry and Mahe. Its retail 500ml cans are sold in 600-plus retail stores across Bengaluru, Kerala, West Bengal and Puducherry. While Geist did not share revenue numbers, the company, according to an official statement, is on track to record a 25% year-on-year growth for 2025-26 compared to 2024-25.
The award in Nuremberg—Geist is the first Indian brewery to win it—caps a journey that began more than 20 years ago, way before Manepally founded the company with his school mate Paul Chowdhary in 2006.
Born in Mysuru, Manepally spent the first seven years of his life in Jamshedpur where his father worked at Telco (Tata Motors today). The family moved to Bengaluru and Manepally grew up seeing his father—“ever the consummate entrepreneur”—try his hand at multiple ventures before building a successful auto components business. After a bachelor’s in engineering from BMS College of Engineering, Manepally headed to the US in the early 1990s to pursue his master’s in engineering from Virginia Tech. After graduating, he joined Intel in Princeton, New Jersey. “The CEO at the time was the legendary Andrew ‘Andy’ Stephen Grove. He had tasked me and another colleague to conceive a real-time software product. We came up with the idea of a video-conferencing system—much like Zoom—which eventually became Intel Proshare,” he recalls.
Following a successful demo of the product at an Intel conference, Manepally and his project colleagues were, in 1993, relocated to Intel’s campus in Hillsboro, Portland—considered the company’s largest research and manufacturing hub in the world. The relocation was, in hindsight, fortuitous because it was in Portland, considered the “mecca of craft beer in North America” that Manepally discovered his true passion.
“I would go to these local breweries and I remember being completely smitten by the beers I was drinking. In fact, I still remember the first drink I had. It was an IPA (India Pale Ale) called Hammerhead. I hated it when I first had it but soon enough, it was the only thing I drank,” he shares. For the next decade, Manepally’s love for craft beers saw him diving right in to make his own. “I loved the science of brewing, and so I brewed hundreds of varieties of beer in my garage.”
If the US during the decade of 1993-2003 had a strong craft beer culture taking shape, the scene in India was the exact opposite—beverage options were extremely limited. Recalling a funny anecdote from when he was visiting Bengaluru in the mid-1990s, Manepally says, “I was at a restaurant and asked a waiter what beers they had. His enthusiastic response was, ‘Sir, we have three beers: Kingfisher, Kingfisher and Kingfisher!’”
There was very little choice for customers and for Manepally, the void was too large to ignore. “While the beers available at the time were good, I felt that Indians deserved more variety, and that is how this entire thing started,” he says.
He quit Intel, having spent more than a decade there, and returned to India in 2003. Manepally spent the next five years running his father’s auto components business in Bengaluru. While Geist was registered in 2006, it was in 2009 that Manepally finally took over the reins of the bootstrapped company. What ensued was a roller-coaster journey.
“The initial idea that my partner and I had was to set up a microbrewery. So we met multiple state government officials until we learnt that Karnataka’s excise laws at the time did not have a defined licence category for microbreweries. We were told that since there were no laws, we’d be doing something illegal if we set one up,” Manepally laughs.
While it may seem like an all too unreal memory that can be laughed at, it was one of the many hiccups that Manepally and his team had to learn to overcome over the years. (The Karnataka excise laws were amended in 2010 to incorporate microbreweries within the regulatory framework.)
With the idea of the microbrewery seeming implausible, Manepally and Chowdhary decided to pivot to a maverick idea. “I had mentors who suggested that we do India’s first reverse outsourcing of beer,” Manepally chuckles.
The 2000s were a time when India, especially Bengaluru, was gaining recognition as the hub for IT outsourcing. “While you had firms in the US and the UK buying technology from India, we did the reverse: we outsourced the beer-making, based on our recipes, to a brewery in Belgium, which we’d then sell in India.”
The four beer flavours they sold this way were “Whistling Wheat, a dark Belgian Ale called Geist Dark, Geist Blond, and Geist Strong Blond.” The years between 2009 and 2016 saw Manepally and Chowdhary doing multiple gigs, including helping set up two microbreweries in Bengaluru. 2016 was also the year when another school mate, the late Mohan Alapatt, joined Geist.
“2016 is when we decided that we were going to start Geist Brewing Co. and set up a factory because we wanted to create a distribution craft brewery,” says Manepally. Unlike a microbrewery, which under Karnataka excise regulations can serve beer only on its own premises, a distribution craft brewery can bottle and sell its beers to bars, restaurants and retail outlets. “We got the licence that same year, and our first beer batch shipped out of this facility on 5 August 2017, ” says Manepally.
In India, alcohol regulation is a state subject and the laws can vary from one state to another. Running a brewery like Geist in such a scenario, Manepally admits, requires one to be patient and adept at doing the bureaucratic tango with policymakers.
Geist’s measured growth in the last decade mirrors the evolution of the Indian craft beer industry. While veteran players like United Breweries Limited (UBL), AB InBev and Carlsberg continue to rule the beer market, the craft beer space has thrown up some new favourites like Simba, Doolally and Toit, among others.
According to a June 2025 article in the Indian hospitality news and analysis magazine Hospitalitybizindia, India is currently home to over 300 microbreweries. A 2025 report by market data firm IMARC valued the Indian craft beer market size at $5.8 billion, which is expected to grow to $37.9 billion by 2034 at a CAGR of 23.20%.
“Every year, India adds the population of one Australia to the legal drinking age, which is about 23-odd million people. Now, 70% of this cohort is saying that they’re willing to drink alcohol. If even 50% of the people in this group say they will drink beer, that gives us about 7-8 million people whom we can convert into our customers,” Manepally says of the market potential. “The craft beer industry in this country has a fantastic future.”
As for Geist’s future, Manepally talks about plans to expand into multiple states in the next few years. “We also have plans to double our retail and on-premise footprint and expand our hospitality presence, through our beer gardens.” (Geist currently has three beer gardens in Bengaluru.)
There’s a moment where he pauses to look back at how things have come full circle. “After I had graduated from St Joseph’s College, the first place I had applied to was the Hospitality School in Switzerland but my parents convinced me to do engineering instead. Looking at where I am today, I believe that if you’re passionate about something, you will come back to it because nature conspires to help you,” he says.
What advice, if any, would he give to aspiring startup entrepreneurs? “There’s a saying that goes, ‘entrepreneurship is all about being in business long enough till the lightning bolt strikes.’ What they don’t tell you is that running a business feels a lot like you are on a coracle where you are going round and round. You think you are going left when you are actually going right. But the point is to remember to stay on that coracle, enjoy the adventure and declare to yourself that you will get to your destination somehow.”
Indeed. If Manepally’s journey is proof, you might end up winning a gold medal.