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Five minutes with Paul P John

Every year I launch a new blend for the Christmas season. Other than that, we are showing our flagship brands, our single malts, and then we have oak cask finishes, PX, oloroso and so on. All are non-chill filtered, we don’t add any flavour or colour. We have an XO brandy and we’ve also recently launched a gin.

India is the largest whisky market in the world, but most [Indian] whiskies sold are un-matured. We don’t have the rule they have to be matured for two years, like you have in the rest of the world, and a lot of them are molasses-based. We are looking to make extremely high-quality products, and we’d like them to be better known outside India.

I was already making whisky for a big distiller and, as I started drinking single malts, I developed a personal interest. Then it came to my mind, ‘why not start making it in India?’, because people were producing all these blended whiskies. But I wasn’t sure if we could make good-quality single malts, because we were always told you could only really make them in Scotland. So I spent a lot of time in Scotland, tasted a lot of whiskies and figured out we had pretty much everything we needed in India, we just needed the will to do it. I took the chance. My master distiller and me started trialling, learning as we went. And now others are jumping in, including some of the big companies like Pernod and Diageo that are set up in India. They suddenly realised ‘these guys have jumped ahead of us’, but fortunately it takes six to eight years with single malt, so they are still scrambling around.

• Whiskies
• India
• Scotch
• single malt
• john
• Indian whisky
• Paul John distillery