Mumbai’s Gateway Brewing Co. and a home brewer come together to launch Kaapi, a stout infused with single-estate coffee.

What happens when you infuse an Indian stout with a single estate coffee from southern India? You get Kaapi. But, first. in case you are unfamiliar with different styles of beer, here’s a bit about stouts.

A stout is a dark beer made of roasted malts or barley, and the most famous, commercially produced stout is Guinness. Kaapi, though, is Indian, and the result of a collaboration between a homebrewer and the Gateway Brewing Company. Gateway, headquartered in Mumbai, is a craft brewery that makes some fine beers such as the White Zen, a German-style wheat beer, and an India Pale Ale. Its beers are on tap at various pubs and restaurants across the city.

Kaapi was born when home-brewer Pratik Bavishi — Mumbai has a busy home-brewing scene, by the way — called up Gateway head Navin Mittal and asked him to check out a stout he had just brewed.

“Pratik had made a nice stout, but he had made it from imported malts,” says Mittal, who set up Gateway Brewing some four years ago and who serves as a sounding board for home brewers across the city.

“So, I said, why don’t we make the same thing using Indian malt? So, that’s what we did, and then we got coffee from Blue Tokai (a start-up that roasts and sells single estate coffees) and infused the stout with it.”

The duo started by brewing small batches, and earlier this month, Bavishi brewed a big batch — about 400 litres — at Gateway’s brewery, in Dombivli. The stuff was so good, says Mittal, that he decided to offer it as a limited release. Kaapi, which will be launched on January 29, at Woodside Inn, in Andheri, to mark Gateway’s second anniversary, will also be available at other pubs and bars across the city.