Hold my Bira: Can Boom make the craft beer brand great again?

Bottled craft beer pioneer Bira is starting to look a bit pint-sized compared to its former self. And so, it’s reinventing. With a new mass-market product called Boom, Bira seems to be sidestepping pricey watering holes to sit down at Kingfisher’s table. But is there room?

For a brand that was planning to break-even by FY19, Bira doubled its consolidated losses in FY18

To increase its revenue, the company has launched a mass-market beer brand called Boom

Boom will compete with the likes of low-priced Kingfisher and Tuborg

In a bid to bail itself out of a tough market, Bira may have ventured into a tougher one

Somewhere along the way, Bira just stopped being itself.

An unorthodox, low-bitterness craft beer brand, Bira 91 started out in 2015 challenging everything that beer had stood for in India. Everything from its name to its logo screamed millennial, fun, and well-thought-out, and for a while there, beer didn’t seem like an industrial product. But, India’s first bottled craft beer brand isn’t very crafty anymore—hasn’t been for a while.

B9 Beverages-owned Bira brought craft beer to urban masses when there was close to no competition. Now, there are more than 45 brands (such as Chhattisgarh-based Simba, Mumbai-based White Owl and Gurugram-based White Rhino) in the same premium price range as Bira—Rs 100-150 ($1.4-2.2) for a 330 ml bottle.

AUTHOR

Harveen Ahluwalia

In her last assignment, Harveen was at Mint, the business daily published by HT Media. At Mint, where she spent about two years, she wrote stories on retail, food and the media business. Harveen is a B.Com (H) graduate from Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi. She has a diploma in journalism from the Times School of Journalism. Like many folks at The Ken, Harveen talks and tweets a lot. When she isn’t writing or reading, she likes to sketch and doodle. She can be reached at harveen at the-ken dot com.

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