All roads lead to Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Mumbai this weekend as the city gears up to host the Gin Explorers Club gin festival, slated to be an enthralling experience for gin lovers.
The Gin Explorers Club, a gin festival curated by Food Talk India, brings the event to Mumbai after four successful editions in Delhi. The festival, taking place on May 7 & 8, 2022, will feature around 12 homegrown and international gin brands along with a series of restaurant pop-ups serving sumptuous food.
Gin enthusiasts can embrace a gin-tastic experience with a stellar line-up of gins such as Doja, Greater Than, Greater Than: No Sleep Gin, Gordon’s, Hendricks, Jaisalmer, Roku, Samsara, Samsara: The City of Pink, Stranger & Sons, Tamras, Tanqueray, Terai — all under one roof. Jio World Drive will present restaurants like Motodo, SeeSaw, Tacos & Buns By Tori, Papacream, The Sassy Café, Neel, Indigo Delicatessen, Spice-O-Pedia, Kofuku, Arbab, and Legit for the visitors to experience an array of international and Indian flavours. To make the weekend a drool-worthy affair, Yeti, Burma Burma, and Nino Burgers are coming with their lip-smacking food!
The festival will feature an Explorers Flea that showcases homegrown brands like Saucery, Studio Love Letter, and Bartisans to shop from over the two-day festivities.
Anjali Batra, the co-founder of Food Talk India, says, “We are excited to bring the Gin Explorers Club to Mumbai. Our love for gin & cocktails set us out to start GEC back in 2018, and after four inspiring editions in Delhi, we are all set to kick off our first edition in Mumbai. They say no two gins in the world can taste the same, and we have created a canvas for their stories to come alive. The Gin Explorers Club is a place for gin enthusiasts and newbies alike to come and sip, experience & explore this most unusual spirit.”
Like all great things, the Gin Explorers Club also began as an experiment in 2017, when Batra and her team saw a rising interest and curiosity surrounding the spirit. An avid traveller, gin drinker, and collector of gin through her escapades, Batra found scribbling Gin Explorers Club in her diary on one of her trips. “The idea was simple,” she says, “Create an experience that would kickstart a gin-versation in the community and get people to interact with and explore various gin brands.”
The following year, the Gin Explorers Club was born. “The team organised the first-ever Gin Festival in 2018 in Delhi with a guest list of 50 people invited to an evening of gin tasting, and little did they know the incredible gin journey they had in store,” adds Batra.
The Gin Explorers Club is a gin lovers’ community and a product-led platform as it has GEC products reaching people in the comfort of their homes across the country. For example, the ‘Festival-In-A-Box’ kit and infusion kits made during the pandemic for people to experience the spirit in unique way were a huge success.
The organisers are also looking to expand the festival to two other cities, Bengaluru and Goa, by the end of this year. Three years from now, the Gin Explorers Club strives to turn into an annual property in these four cities in India marked on people’s calendars and go global with pop-ups to other countries such as London, Singapore, Australia, and more.
About the Mumbai edition, Batra says, “With so much conversation around the spirit in Mumbai, it had to be the next stop, and we are excited to bring the festival to a city that loves gin. So far, we have been elated with the response and are ready to interact with a new audience as we give the city their first taste of the Gin Explorers Club.”
So, get ready to sway to the eclectic beats with artists like Culoe De Song, Madstarbase, Kayan, Sindhi Curry, Zokhuma, and many more as they set the mood. Come sip, experience & explore your way into a galaxy far, far away when the clock strikes #GinOClock!
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