From risk consulting in Los Angeles to a still in Goa.

Samsara is the gin of Spaceman Spirits Lab, an Indian company whose full name, Spaceman Spirits Lab Pvt Ltd, appears in the copyright line of the brand’s own website. The company’s founding-team page lists three people: Aditya Aggarwal, founder and managing director; Jai Prakash Chopra, co-founder and director; and Riddhi Aggarwal, co-founder and creative director. Trade coverage describes the business as Goa-based: Man’s World India wrote in February 2022 of Aggarwal and his “Goa-based team,” and a product announcement reported in FoodTechBiz says the spirits are crafted in Goa.

Aggarwal’s route into gin was not a family one. The Indian culture site Homegrown reported in June 2021 that he studied at UCLA and then worked as a management and risk consultant for a US-based firm, travelling widely for work, before quitting his job and spending about two years travelling in India and Europe to study how gin is made, including a distillation course in London. It also described him as a space enthusiast, a licensed scuba diver and an artist who works with multi-sensory installations. The same piece described Spaceman as more than a single brand: Aggarwal wanted it to work as a kind of community lab, offering mentorship, equipment and creative inspiration to newcomers in the alcoholic-drinks trade.

Production came through an existing plant rather than a new build. Speaking to Outlook Business for an October 2023 story on the state’s spirits makers headlined “The Lure of Goa’s High Spirits,” Riddhi Aggarwal said the founders had been fortunate to find a distillery in Goa that aligned with their vision, and that they repurposed the facility to meet their own requirements. She also said Goa’s excise rules were somewhat easier to navigate than those of other Indian states.

A legend on the label, eleven botanicals in the bottle.

The brand is built around a story rather than a founder’s portrait. On its website Samsara tells the legend of Lady Saṃsāra, the “Empress of Exploration,” who searches the world for an elixir of life and finds it in a secret botanical garden on the coast of Goa; the company says it made the gin as a tribute to her, and its site frames the recipe as the work of late-night experiments around a copper still.

The liquid is described as a juniper-led gin with a long botanical list. Homegrown reported in 2021 that Samsara uses juniper and eleven other botanicals, among them rose petals, cardamom and coriander seeds, along with spices and herbs sourced from around India, and that the company had partnered with the Bombay Hemp Company on research into infusing hemp seeds; Aggarwal told the site he believed the hemp-seed work was close to a first in Asia. The brand’s own site likewise speaks of eleven botanicals.

Flavour has since become the main way the range grows, and the website weaves the newer gins into the same story. The City of Pink, a pink gin named for Jaipur, was covered by Man’s World India in February 2022, which said it adds notes of rose petals, strawberries and hibiscus to the original gin. The website also presents Vale of Paradise, a gin it ties to the Kashmir Valley, with Himalayan juniper, saffron and the spiced green tea known as kahwa. Samsara and the ready-to-drink brand Everyday Friday released a limited-edition pink gin and soda in a 300 ml can, FoodTechBiz reported, describing Samsara’s signature notes as wild rose, summer berries and hibiscus.

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.

A craft gin with a listed distiller beside it.

The company’s main outside partner is an established distiller. Just Drinks reported in April 2023 that Tilaknagar Industries, the Mumbai-based, publicly listed maker of Mansion House brandy, had agreed to take a 10% stake in Spaceman Spirits Lab, its first move into craft gin; the report described Samsara’s range at that point as a London dry gin and a pink gin, with three more flavours planned. Under a further agreement signed in September 2024, Tilaknagar made a follow-on investment that took its holding to 21.36% on a fully diluted basis, FoodTechBiz reported in August 2025. The same report said that under a usership agreement in place since May 2025, Tilaknagar sells Spaceman’s products in certain Indian states and abroad; Aggarwal remains Spaceman’s founder and managing director.

The portfolio has widened beyond gin. FoodTechBiz listed Samsara Gin alongside Sitara Rum and Amara Vodka in 2025, and quoted plans to move into whisky, heritage liqueurs and tequila. The same publication reported that Samsara is sold in several Indian states and in Canada, Singapore, the UAE, Bahrain, Nepal and Oman.

The name needs care online. The word samsara is used by many unrelated businesses; the gin’s own site is samsaragin.com.

For a design guide, Samsara shows how a young craft gin can lead with a written legend, a traveller’s founding story and a pink-toned flavour range rather than with heritage, giving every new expression a place in the same tale. Compare Stranger & Sons, another Indian craft gin, and Paul John, the Goa single malt. For this guide we use rose petal, hibiscus plum and copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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