A bingo moment with Gin and distilled water

Cherrapunji, Assam holds a record for the wettest place on Earth, a title it shares with its neighbour Mawsynram, depending on the year. It receives so much rain that the ground cannot absorb it fast enough. For most of its history, that rain has simply fallen and run off. Now imagine holding the rainwater in a neatly designed steel bottle and sipping it from your balcony on a warm summer evening, kilometres away in Hyderabad. Mayukh Hazarika did just that. Rain, he reasoned, is distilled water. And distilled water, he discovered, is what gives alcohol and spirits their volume. "That was my bingo moment," says Hazarika, founder of Raincheck Earth, the Shillong-born gin brand that launched in 2023. "I have to do alcohol because this is the only way I can use rainwater." He turned the rainwater from Meghalaya's meteorological fact into a founding ingredient for his brand Cherrapunji Gin.

Gin is bottled at a set ABV of 42.8% and the remainder is distilled water. But Hazarika, who spent 17 years in marketing before Covid sent him back to Shillong, was not building a hook. He was building a product philosophy, and the rainwater was its first expression.

Authentically Indian, all the way

The philosophy extended to every botanical in the bottle. And for this, he did not want to look miles across the world for exclusivity; he realised that several of the botanicals available in India are GI-tagged. This means they can only come from their region of origin, giving Cherrapunji an authenticity that cannot be replicated by competitors swapping in ingredients from elsewhere.

Gin requires juniper — a berry that grows across the Himalayan region as well as in Europe — and there was no reason, Hazarika decided, to import it. Citrus from Assam instead of Italian lemon. Coriander from Assam instead of Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. "Everything is available there," he says. "It's not rocket science."

The category made this possible in a way that few other spirits could. "Gin is one of the few alcoholic products where you are actually able to taste the place," Hazarika explains. A Japanese gin, an African gin, and a Mediterranean gin taste entirely different from one another, in ways that wine from three different continents might not. The ability to make an all-Indian drink with only locally sourced ingredients made the brand stand out.

A bottle of steel

The liquid was one decision. The vessel was another, and this is where Hazarika made the move that set the brand furthest apart from convention.

He began by looking at glass. Spirit bottles, he found, have a recycling rate of roughly 30% in India, poor, compared to beer bottles, which get refilled and therefore retain value. Steel, by contrast, has a recyclability rate above 90% because steel has inherent monetary value to the informal recycling economy. "In India, we see all these guys who come and collect steel materials. They pay us for that." The economic incentive for recycling was already built into the material. Glass, despite its appearance on premium shelves, was structurally harder to recover.

The practical case stacked up alongside the environmental one. A standard spirit glass bottle weighs 550 to 750 grammes empty and sometimes more. Cherrapunji Gin's stainless steel bottle weighs 158 grammes. Breakage rates for glass run at 2 to 3%; Raincheck Earth's run below 0.25%. And because the stainless steel bottle is leaner and lighter, shipping economics shift dramatically: where a competitor's pallet holds 56 cases, Raincheck Earth ships 96 in the same space.

"Stainless steel should have been a natural choice of material," Hazarika says. "It is only because of economic reasons that people opt for glass."

He did not conduct consumer research before making the switch. "No consumer research will tell you this," he says. If he had put an unfamiliar stainless steel bottle in front of focus groups, they would likely have said they wanted glass. The same logic, he points out, would have told Apple not to build the MacBook. "Sometimes, when you're making products which people have probably not seen, you can stay away from research."

Manufacturing

Raincheck Earth began by importing its bottles from China, where manufacturing specialisation is well-entrenched, and quality is consistent. Giving an example, he says a cap factory makes caps, a printing factory prints and a bottle factory makes bottles. In India, Hazarika found, the same supplier typically does all three with trade-offs in each.

"Water bottle manufacturers don't care if one bottle looks different from the other," he says. "But this is a brand. I cannot have a 5% tolerance." Achieving the consistency the brand required meant installing his own quality control processes where none existed, and recalibrating supplier expectations wholesale.

The printing process itself is UV surface printing, not stickers, not transfers. The bottle is prepared and washed, then checked for paint rejection before entering the printing facility, where machines need calibration every two hours to maintain consistent output. Temperature control is non-negotiable: the ink must stay within a precise range, the facility must be air-conditioned, and every variable that drifts will show up in the finished bottle.

"My biggest learning has been that every region, every country, even South and North suppliers within India, are completely different," Hazarika reflects. "Where processes don't exist, you have to make the processes. Where quality control doesn't exist, you have to create your own quality control rulebook." The move from Chinese to Indian manufacturing, which he had expected to happen quickly, took far longer and required adjustments. Manufacturing cost per unit runs four to five times higher than that of glass.

Hazarika is direct about this, and equally direct about what it means: "People are not buying the bottle. They are buying the liquid, the story, the culture. The bottle is a vessel." The repeat purchase rate from existing markets is, he says, the proof.

Story told through design

The bottle needed to carry the story visually, and for that Hazarika turned to a Portland-based Indian designer with a specific brief: create a design language the brand can own. The result on the original Cherrapunji variant is an illustrated world of the North-East — waterfalls, test tubes, red pandas, buses — rendered in a style distinctive enough to be recognisable as belonging to one brand. "The idea was to make it a fun, collectable design bottle. When it's badly designed, people just throw it."

Mountain Berry Gin with Cherry Blossom, a newer variant, uses the same design language in a different register — cherry blossoms, waterfalls, leopards — reflecting the season after the rain. It also introduced the jigger cap: a patented mechanism in which the bottle's own cap serves as a measuring vessel, marked to 30 ml on the 750 ml bottle and to both 30 ml and 60 ml on the one-litre duty-free variant. "All of us at home don't own jiggers," Hazarika says. "It's a dead space. Why should I not just put a level and let people measure it?" It took close to a year to get the mechanism right, but it is now a feature Hazarika describes as integral to the bottle's usefulness rather than its aesthetics.

Growth plan: What next

Raincheck Earth is currently available across ten states in India and is preparing to enter the UK. International reception has been strong, Hazarika says, "People really love the idea of the bottle, the packaging, the story," and the export logistics work in the brand's favour. Different markets require different labels and carton specifications, and each state in India requires separate regulatory approval for non-standard packaging. The approvals barrier, combined with the cost and supply chain complexity, has kept the field clear of imitators so far. "It's just a matter of time before somebody comes out with another steel bottle," Hazarika acknowledges, without apparent concern.

The growth plan is expansion into many more Indian states, robust international distribution, and new products. The material, too, may not always be steel: for a whisky, where consumers want to see the colour of the liquid in the glass, stainless steel would be the wrong choice. "Horses for courses. Your material of choice has to be relevant to the category of liquid you are selling."

What will not change is the founding logic that a product from a place, made with what the place provides, is packaged to last longer than the first pour. "What we are exporting is culture," Hazarika says. "Not a stainless steel bottle."