A Delhi bar, a spare-room still and a shed in Goa.

Greater Than is the first gin from Nao Spirits & Beverages, a company started by people who poured drinks for a living. Business India reported in August 2021 that Anand Virmani, Nao’s co-founder and chief executive, co-owned the Delhi bar Perch with Vaibhav Singh, and named Aparajita Ninan and Abhinav Rajput as their partners. Nao’s own timeline says that in 2015, when gin was booming abroad, the two Delhi bar owners were waiting for a wave of new gin brands that never reached India, and decided to make one themselves. The company says Virmani had come to the idea after Rémy Cointreau closed its India office, and that Ninan joined to begin shaping how the brands would look.

The first experiments were domestic. Writing on The Gin Guide, Virmani says he and Ninan, his wife and business partner, distilled in a spare bedroom on a tiny pot still and tested more than 120 botanicals one at a time, while the wine bar where he worked, a coffee shop by day, served the results to guests and bartenders. Nao says it then attended a craft distilling conference in the UK and persuaded Dr Anne Brock, later master distiller at Bombay Sapphire, to travel to Goa and teach the team how to make gin properly.

Goa became the base because Nao found partners there with a facility and the right licences, the company says. Its distillery is, in its own words, a tiny shed in the back corner of a large bottling plant; Business India placed the distilling in Margao. The copper pot still arrived in early 2017, Nao says, built in Hungary and named Agotha, Hungarian for “good hearted”. The Gin Guide describes it as a 1,000-litre still. Reports differ on when the company itself began: a PTI report carried by Business Today in March 2022 dated Nao’s launch to 2016, while Diageo India’s June 2025 announcement says Nao was launched in 2017.

A London Dry made in India, named for mathematicians.

Greater Than reached the market on 30 September 2017, the date Nao says its permissions finally came through, and was sold first in Goa and Bangalore. Diageo India’s 2025 announcement says the London Dry gin launched that September and calls it India’s first craft gin. Nao says the copper pot still is what lets it call the gin a London Dry. Virmani has written that the Himalayan gin that became Hapusa was actually developed first, but that the team chose to release Greater Than first, as a gin to build the category in India.

The recipe uses nine botanicals. Business India listed them in 2021 as lemongrass, ginger, chamomile, fennel, Spanish orange peel, German angelica, Italian orris root, juniper and coriander seed; The Gin Guide gives the strength as 42.8 per cent and the base as a grain spirit. Nao’s tasting note describes juniper and fresh lemon peel on the nose, fennel on the tongue and ginger on the finish. The Gin Guide explains the name as a nod to India’s long history of great mathematicians, with a playful comparison against the competition built in.

The brand has grown through limited editions, which Nao dates as Juniper Bomb (2020), No Sleep (2021), Broken Bat (2022) and Punk Gin (2024). Virmani says Juniper Bomb came out of a power cut in the middle of a distillation and No Sleep out of experiments with cold-brew coffee. The Gin Guild’s June 2025 news report describes Broken Bat as a cask-aged Greater Than finished with toasted Kashmir willow, the wood of cricket bats. Nao has also built bartender programmes such as Bar Wars and a Forager’s Journey around its gins, Virmani says.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Indian gins or gin-led ranges: Greater Than, Hapusa, Stranger & Sons, Jaisalmer, Samsara, Terai and Short Story. They come from very different kinds of company. Greater Than and Hapusa are both made by Nao Spirits, and Stranger & Sons and the Short Story range both come from Third Eye Distillery, which Outlook Business reported in 2023 was set up in 2018. Samsara comes from Spaceman & Company, the same magazine reported. Jaisalmer belongs to Radico Khaitan, the spirits company headquartered in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, and Terai to Globus Spirits, whose Terai Litchi & Mulberries gin was made at The India Craft Spirits Co. distillery in Behror, Rajasthan, Ambrosia India reported in December 2024.

Goa is the common thread for several of them. Outlook Business reported in October 2023 that the state saw eight to 10 new gin brands launched every year between 2015 and 2023. In the same report, Nao Spirits’ co-founder and CEO Anand Virmani said the company was able to tie up with an existing manufacturer in Goa and build its own unit within that licensed site, and Samsara’s co-founder Riddhi Aggarwal said the brand had found a distillery in Goa that suited its plans. For that reason, these guides treat the name on the bottle and the place where the spirit is distilled as two separate questions.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it and when, who owns it now, where its gin is made and how its labels and bottles present it — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Delhi start-up to Diageo India subsidiary.

The look of Greater Than was a deliberate refusal. On The Gin Guide, Virmani writes that Nao decided from the start not to cover its bottles with elephants or peacocks, and aimed for honesty and clarity instead — a gin that spoke of a modern India in two words. Ninan told Brummell magazine in July 2022 that the design decisions for both Nao gins were guided by the modern India the founders lived in, rather than the colonial stories that might have seemed an obvious link between gin and the country.

Ownership changed in stages. In March 2022 United Spirits, the Diageo-controlled company that trades as Diageo India, said it would buy a 22.5 per cent minority stake in Nao, with a call option on the remaining shares, Business Today reported. Just Drinks reported that United Spirits added a further 7.5 per cent in 2023, taking it to about 30 per cent. On 19 June 2025 Diageo India announced it was taking a majority controlling stake, and a United Spirits stock-exchange filing dated 26 June 2025 says the first tranche was completed that day, giving it 97.07 per cent of Nao’s share capital and making Nao a subsidiary. A smaller second tranche was left for a later stage. Diageo India said Virmani would continue to lead the business, which it placed within its Ventures investment arm, the Gin Guild reported.

Nao is described as New Delhi-based in Just Drinks’ coverage, while the gin itself is still made in Goa. In 2024 the company added an aged, spiced rum, PIPA, to its range, according to Diageo India.

For a design guide, Greater Than shows how a two-word name and a deliberately plain, modern presentation can carry a craft gin from a single still in Goa into the Diageo group. Compare Hapusa, its Himalayan sibling from Nao Spirits, and Tanqueray, the London Dry gin now in the same Diageo family. For this guide we use copper, lemon peel and coastal cream with a plain sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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