A hospitality family, a sugar mill and a malt distillery in Haryana.

Indri is a single malt whisky made in northern India by Piccadily Agro Industries Limited, a publicly listed company whose two businesses, it says, are distilling and sugar. The brand takes its name from Indri, a town in the Karnal district of Haryana, where the distillery stands; English Wikipedia, citing The Economic Times in 2024, says the whisky is named after the place where it is made. The US importer Skurnik Wines describes the setting as the foothills of the Himalayas near the basin of the Yamuna river.

The company traces its roots well before whisky. Piccadily says that in 1953 Pt. K. N. Sharma started a business called Kedar Nath and Sons in Doraha, in what was then undivided Punjab, and built a liquor retail trade across several Indian states. The family then opened the Piccadily Restaurant and Bar in Chandigarh, the company says, and its success led to hotels in Chandigarh, Manali and Raipur, cinemas in Chandigarh, Amritsar and Jalandhar, and later five-star hotels in New Delhi, Gurgaon and Ludhiana.

Manufacturing came later. According to the company’s own timeline, the family set up a sugar mill in 1994, commissioned a grain-based distillery in 2007, and in 2010 established a malt distillery and began maturing spirit in barrels; Skurnik dates the Indri distillery’s single malt production to 2012. For years the malt went into other products. In 2017 Piccadily entered the branded spirits market with Whistler, a blended malt, the company says, before putting its own name to a single malt.

The Haryana site is large. Piccadily says its flagship distillery at Indri covers 168 acres, runs partly on biomass energy, and makes malt spirit alongside cask-aged rum, neutral alcohol and ethanol, with warehouses holding more than 75,000 barrels in casks ranging from virgin American oak to Pedro Ximénez sherry. It describes itself as the largest independent maker and seller of malt spirits in India.

Six-row barley, three woods and a fast-moving range.

Piccadily says it introduced Indri in 2022; English Wikipedia gives 2021 for the brand’s introduction and 2022 for its official launch. The first bottling was Trini – The Three Wood, its name taken from the Sanskrit for “three.” It is matured in three kinds of cask: ex-bourbon, ex-French red wine and ex-Pedro Ximénez sherry. Skurnik, which imports the whisky into the United States, calls it the first Indian single malt fully matured in that combination of casks.

The raw material is local. Indri is distilled from six-row Indian barley, which Skurnik says is hand-harvested by family farmers in Bundi, Rajasthan, and which Piccadily describes as non-GMO. The spirit is made in copper pot stills that Skurnik says were designed and built in India, and the distillery has its own cooperage to assemble, toast, char and repair barrels. Skurnik names Graeme Hamilton Bowie, a veteran of the Scotch whisky industry, as master distiller and Surrinder Kumar as master blender; English Wikipedia credits Kumar, whose name is also spelled Surinder, with developing Trini.

Skurnik also says the region’s extremes of temperature speed up maturation, so the whiskies taste older than their years. The range grew quickly from that base. In 2023 Piccadily added Dru, a cask-strength bottling, and the first Diwali Collector’s Edition, with further editions in 2024 and 2025.

Other bottlings followed, according to the company. Agneya is matured in sherry and bourbon casks; the Founder’s Reserve is an 11-year-old single malt, which English Wikipedia says is dedicated to the founder Pt. Kidar Nath Sharma; and the City Series was made for duty-free shops in Mumbai, Dubai and Bengaluru. Piccadily has also released House of Black and House of Green, a peated and an unpeated edition tied to HBO’s House of the Dragon, and its travel-retail range includes a Triple Cask. Piccadily also makes Camikara, an aged rum distilled from sugarcane juice, which it launched in 2022.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all whisky distilleries from India, Japan and Australia: Paul John, Rampur, Indri, Chichibu, Kanosuke, Starward and Lark. Whisky distilleries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a bar list.

A whisky brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its whisky is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its whisky is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A listed company, a 2025 visitor centre and a Scottish site.

Indri is owned and made by Piccadily Agro Industries, a publicly listed company with its registered office near Indri in Haryana, and the company has expanded around it. Its timeline records a fund-raising and capacity expansion in 2024, and in November 2024 Just Drinks reported that the first phase of an expansion of the Indri malt and ethanol plant was due to be finished in early 2025, taking warehousing past 100,000 barrels. Piccadily also runs a neutral-alcohol plant at Mahasamund in Chhattisgarh.

The company is also building abroad. Just Drinks reported in November 2024 that Piccadily planned a distillery on a 58-acre site at Portavadie, in Scotland, and had secured HM Revenue & Customs approval; Piccadily calls it an industry first for an Indian drinks company and says the site will make Scotch-style malts. Indri itself is still made in Haryana. In 2025 the company opened the Indri Experience Centre, a visitor centre at the distillery, according to its own timeline.

The brand’s reach now goes well beyond India. English Wikipedia says exports began in 2022 to the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, and the Indri website lists markets from Japan and Singapore to Germany, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. The name has an unrelated namesake: the indri is also a lemur of Madagascar. The brand’s own site is indri.in; the company is at piccadily.com.

For a design guide, Indri shows how a single malt can take its name from the town where it is distilled and build a range of named bottlings — Trini, Dru, Agneya — around one site and one kind of barley. Compare Amrut, the Bengaluru distillery that took Indian single malt abroad, and Paul John, distilled in Goa. For this guide we use peacock teal, copper and barley sand with a classical serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Indri’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.