Introducing Darooh: Bringing India's Craft Spirits to the US

Our name says most of what we're about. Darooh joins two Hindi words: दारू (daru), spirit, and रूह (rooh), soul. Spirit plus soul. Every bottle we bring has to have both.

We're Darooh, and we bring curated, award-winning craft spirits from India to the US: to the Indian diaspora first, and through them to everyone who loves a great drink.

Who we're bringing

India is in the middle of a craft spirits wave, and almost none of it has reached American shelves yet. Small, independent distillers are taking Indian ingredients and their own traditions and making spirits that win medals around the world.

Here's a taste of what's coming:

• Indian agave. Yes, India grows agave. There are spirits made from agave on the Deccan Plateau, bright and earthy, that sit happily next to a good blanco or mezcal. And there's wild agave aged in Goa into a reposado and an añejo, with the warmth and depth you'd want from a sipping spirit.

• Gins with Indian botanicals. One turns from deep indigo to pink, violet or electric blue depending on what you mix it with. Another is a Goan gin inspired by 1930s speakeasies, full of cardamom, cinnamon and citrus. There are contemporary Indian gins built for the cocktail you haven't invented yet.

• Rums with a sense of place. Indian craft rum made the way it should be, plus one bursting with mango and citron.

• Vodkas that actually taste like India. One is scented with khus, the cooling vetiver root of Indian summers. Another is infused with saffron.

These are bottles with real stories behind them, from people who care about every batch. We'd rather carry a short list of spirits we love than a long one we don't.

Why we started

Bimal collects spirits from all over the world and has spent his life in business. Sidd is a tech leader who'd rather be behind a bar making a cocktail nobody's tried before. We kept noticing the same thing.

Walk into an Indian restaurant in the US and look at the bar. Beyond a whiskey or two, there's almost no Indian liquor. Walk into an Indian-run liquor store and it's the same story. The spirits are out there, and they're good. They just weren't making it here.

We think they deserve a place on US shelves, at the bars where we eat and the stores where we shop. So we're bringing them, starting with our own community and sharing them with everyone else from there.

How we make it work

Bringing a small distiller's bottle across an ocean is usually hard, slow and confusing. We built technology to make it simple. It handles the compliance heavy lifting, so great small distillers abroad can get their spirits to American drinkers without drowning in paperwork. It also shows them where their bottles end up and who's falling in love with them, which most of them have never been able to see.

Come say hi

Take a look around darooh.net and the catalog, and see what catches your eye. Bars, shops and restaurants can hit "Express Interest" on any bottle. And if you're a craft distiller in India thinking about the US, write to us at hello@darooh.net. We'd love to hear your story.

Explore the catalog

Spirit plus soul. We're so glad you're here.

Siddharth and Bimal