Three white spirits from a Goa-based company that began with one gin.

Short Story is not a single gin but a small family of white spirits. When the range appeared in 2022 it held three bottles — a dry gin, a grain vodka and a white rum — and all three come from Third Eye Distillery, the company that also makes Stranger & Sons gin. The Week introduced it in October 2022 as “the latest from Goa-based Third Eye Distillery,” and Man’s World India described it that December as the company’s newest drop, “which has a gin, vodka, and rum.”

The company behind it is young. Outlook Business reported in October 2023 that Third Eye Distillery was set up in 2018 with the idea of elevating cocktail culture in India, and The Whiskey Wash dated the company’s debut with Stranger & Sons gin to the same year. The Established named the three co-founders in January 2024 as Rahul Mehra, his wife Sakshi Saigal, and Vidur Gupta, and said they bootstrapped their first product, the Stranger & Sons gin. Gupta told Entrepreneur India in February 2024 that the idea grew out of the years he and Saigal spent working and living in Spain and the UK, exploring restaurants and bars, and that the company had wanted from the start to become a house of several brands rather than a single label.

Short Story was the first step in that direction. In the same Established profile, Mehra said the company needed a portfolio of brands to compete both with regional Indian producers and with international labels, and that Short Story was its answer in the white-spirits segment. Entrepreneur India listed the range in 2024 as a dry gin, a grain vodka and a white rum, and Outlook Business called it Short Story Spirits — gin, vodka and rum — in its 2023 survey of Goa’s distillers.

A bartender at the helm and a range built for cocktails.

From its launch the brand had a bartender’s name attached to it. The Week reported in October 2022 that the mixologist Pankaj Balachandran was at the helm as Short Story’s brand director, and Outlook Business quoted him in 2023 describing Short Story as a product range from Third Eye Distillery. In an interview with Homegrown in September 2025, Balachandran, a founding partner of the beverage consultancy Countertop India and a co-founder of the Goa bar Boilermaker, said that with his background in flavour and liquid development he worked on everything from creating the liquid to shaping the branding and the launch strategy.

He also gave the reasoning behind a range of white spirits rather than another gin. At the time, he told Homegrown, everyone was making gin, while by his estimate a large majority of cocktails around the world are built on white spirits other than gin; Short Story, he said, was designed to fill that space.

The gin itself is described in London dry terms. The Week called it an 11-botanical blend of traditional, pot-distilled London dry gin with a strong citrus and juniper foundation on the palate. The other two bottles round out the trio: the grain vodka and the white rum that Entrepreneur India listed alongside the gin in 2024.

The house style around it is easier to see in its older sibling. Stranger & Sons says on its own website that its gin is created and distilled in India, tells a story of a three-eyed, two-tailed creature from the Western Ghats, and says its bottle carries a sun insignia for daytime gimlets and a moon insignia for evening gibsons. Short Story was launched under a different name and with a different job: plain, mixable white spirits from the same Goa-based company.

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.

One range inside a growing house of brands.

Short Story arrived as Third Eye Distillery was widening in several directions at once. Man’s World India reported in December 2022 that the company had acquired Svami, a premium mixer brand, and Countertop India, a consultancy that works with alcohol brands and hospitality businesses, and that it held the rights to import the Caribbean rum Plantation; it described Third Eye as more of a house of brands than a mere gin maker, with Stranger & Sons and Short Story as its flagships. The Established dated both the Svami and Countertop deals to later in 2022, and Entrepreneur India described the Svami move in 2024 as a major stake.

The range kept growing upward too. In February 2025 The Whiskey Wash reported that Third Eye had entered India’s whisky market with Otherside Subcontinental Whiskey, launched in Goa and Maharashtra, and quoted Mehra, the company’s CEO and co-founder, saying that Scots had set the rules for whisky for too long and that it was time for India to write its own story.

The setting matters. Outlook Business reported in 2023 that Goa saw eight to 10 new gin brands launched every year between 2015 and 2023. Third Eye Distillery, Nao Spirits and Spaceman & Company were among the businesses the magazine profiled in that survey.

For a design guide, Short Story shows how a young craft distiller can extend its house without stretching its first brand, giving a separate name to a trio of bar staples built for mixing. Compare Stranger & Sons, the Third Eye gin that came first, and Greater Than, the Nao Spirits gin from Goa. For this guide we use juniper green, citrus peel and page cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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