Food has always been at the heart of some of our best moments, from family celebrations and restaurant meals to evenings spent sharing a table with friends. Yet when it comes to choosing what to drink with food, the process often works the other way around: a drink is created first, and we later decide which foods might pair well with it.
BARHI began with a different question. What if we started with the food and created the drink around it?
A Question That Started in 2010
The idea behind BARHI goes back to 2010, when our founder, Vikas Thakker, conducted consumer research in Mumbai exploring how people experienced alcohol alongside food. Nearly 40% of respondents felt that no alcoholic beverage truly complemented Indian food.
It was an interesting finding. Indian cuisine is built around layers of flavour, with spice, acidity, richness, sweetness and aromatics often appearing within the same meal. Yet the drinks available alongside it had rarely been created specifically with that complexity in mind.
That raised the question that would eventually lead to BARHI: could we create a drink by starting with the dining experience rather than the drinks category?
Creating the Drink Around the Food
That question shaped the development process that followed.
Rather than deciding at the outset that BARHI needed to be a particular type of beer, wine or other established drink, the focus was on what we wanted it to do at the table. It needed to be refreshing enough to enjoy throughout a meal, able to sit comfortably alongside bold flavours and light enough not to overwhelm the food itself.
Years of experimentation eventually led to fresh Barhee dates and honey. Through fermentation, ingredients normally associated with sweetness could produce something quite different: a dry, crisp and lightly sparkling drink.
Today, we describe that drinking experience as a Fresh Date Spritz.
BARHI is 6% ABV, naturally gluten-free and made with no added sugar. More importantly, its character reflects the original idea behind it: a drink intended to complement the meal rather than compete with it.
Why Food Was the Starting Point
Pairing drinks with Indian and other spice-rich cuisines can be particularly interesting because there is rarely only one flavour on the plate. A meal might move from something grilled and smoky to a rich curry, a sharper chutney and an aromatic rice dish, all while the same drink remains in the glass.
That made refreshment particularly important during BARHI’s development. The aim wasn’t to create an intensely flavoured drink that demanded attention of its own, but something that could refresh the palate between bites and remain enjoyable as the flavours on the table changed.
This philosophy eventually led to two expressions of BARHI.
BARHI Original and BARHI Spiced
That food-first philosophy eventually led to two expressions of BARHI, because different characteristics in a meal ask different things from the drink.
BARHI Original is the cleaner and crisper of the two. Made with fresh Barhee dates and honey, its light, refreshing character works particularly well when chilli heat is one of the defining features of the dish. Rather than adding another intense flavour, Original provides a refreshing contrast before you return to the food.
BARHI Spiced adds star anise and orange peel, giving it a more aromatic character. It works particularly well with seafood, rich creamy gravies and BBQ, grilled or tandoori dishes where richness, smoke or char are more central to the experience.
The distinction isn’t simply Original for mild food and Spiced for spicy food. Chilli heat, richness, seafood, smoke and char create different pairing requirements, and thinking about those differences is part of the food-first approach that shaped BARHI.
A Different Approach to Food and Drink
Wine has a long tradition of food pairing, while beer, cider and cocktails each have their own established place at the table. BARHI wasn’t created simply because we thought the drinks menu needed another option. It came from questioning whether drinks developed independently of the meal necessarily provided the experience we wanted alongside flavour-rich food.
Instead of creating the drink first and finding its food pairing afterwards, we spent years asking what we wanted the drink itself to do while we were eating. That journey ultimately took us from consumer research in 2010 to a dry, lightly sparkling Fresh Date Spritz made from fresh Barhee dates and honey.
Today BARHI is an award-winning drink served in restaurants and enjoyed alongside cuisines far beyond the dishes that first inspired it, but the philosophy hasn’t changed: start with the food, then think about the drink.
If you’d like to understand what that philosophy meant at product level, read What Makes a Good Drink with Food?, where we explore the role of refreshment, gentle carbonation and a clean finish. Or read What Alcohol Really Works with Indian Food? to see why BARHI challenges some of the conventional choices made around an Indian meal.
You can also discover BARHI Original and BARHI Spiced or find BARHI near you.
Made for the love of food. Brewed for the celebration of laughter.
