From a hill-station brewery to the Old Monk company.

Solan Gold is a single malt whisky made by Mohan Meakin Ltd, the company best known for Old Monk rum. Its name comes from Solan, the Himachal Pradesh hill town where the company keeps its registered office at the Solan Brewery, and its malt comes from Kasauli, a nearby hill station where the business began. Mohan Meakin’s history page traces the company to a brewery set up at Kasauli by Edward Dyer in 1855. English Wikipedia’s articles put Dyer’s start earlier, at dates ranging from the late 1820s to the 1840s, and give 1855 as the year the business was incorporated as Dyer Breweries. English Wikipedia names its first beer as Lion.

A second brewing name joined later. The company says H. G. Meakin, who had trained in a brewing family at Burton-on-Trent, founded Meakin & Co. Ltd, bought the old Simla and Kasauli breweries and built others at Dalhousie, Ranikhet, Chakrata, Darjeeling and Kirkee; English Wikipedia dates his purchase of the Shimla and Solan breweries from Dyer to 1887. The two firms traded separately until after the First World War and then joined as Dyer Meakin & Co. Ltd, the company says, and brewing at Kasauli was stopped in favour of a new brewing and bottling plant at Solan, while malting continued at Kasauli.

The Mohan name arrived after independence. English Wikipedia says Narendra Nath Mohan bought a majority stake in Dyer Meakin Breweries in London and took over management in 1949; the company describes that year as a turning point and credits him with building an industrial centre near Ghaziabad, Mohan Nagar. Dates for the renaming differ: the company says it became Mohan Meakin Breweries Ltd on 1 November 1966 and Mohan Meakin Ltd on 24 April 1980, while English Wikipedia gives 1967 and 1982. The company’s history page goes on to credit Brigadier Kapil Mohan with a major diversification.

Kasauli malt, from Solan No. 1 to Solan Gold.

Kasauli became a distillery. English Wikipedia says that when the growing town began taking much of the spring water, the brewery was dismantled and production moved to Solan, about 25 kilometres away, and that the old site was converted into a distillery that Mohan Meakin still runs. The company’s own list of works describes Kasauli as a distillery “producing malt spirit.”

The whisky most associated with it is Solan No. 1. Citing a 2012 report in Mint, English Wikipedia says Solan No. 1 is still made at Kasauli using some of the original equipment, including a copper pot still. Mohan Meakin’s whiskies page now lists Solan No 1 and Solan No 1 Black alongside Rips Royal, Golden Oak, Colonels Special and Diplomat Deluxe.

At the head of that list, on a page last updated in September 2024, is “The Solan Gold Indian Single Malt Whisky.” In April 2024 the Indian drinks blog The Happy High described Solan as a heritage name among Indian whisky enthusiasts and said Solan No. 1, long a cult malt, had been reintroduced as Solan Gold single malt.

Details of how it is made come mostly from the US trade. The listing on The Daily Pour names the Kasauli Distillery as distiller and Mohan Meakin Limited as bottler, gives no age statement and a strength of 42.8 per cent, and says the whisky is made in copper pot stills from malted barley and Himalayan spring water and matured in virgin American oak casks, at a distillery more than 6,000 feet above sea level.

Asian craft spirits.

The six brands in this group are all spirits from Asia: Omar, Godawan, Kamet, Solan Gold, Three Societies and Kiyomi. Five are whisky names, from Taiwan, India and South Korea, and one is a rum from Okinawa. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small independent distilleries to labels that belong to much larger drinks groups or state-linked companies, and a single name can be sold everywhere from a duty-free shelf to a bar list abroad.

A spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by the liquid than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands or names, sourced its grain or cane from elsewhere, 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 spirit is actually distilled, matured 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 spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A town’s name, a company’s range.

Solan Gold carries the identity of a company more than of a single product. Mohan Meakin’s website groups its brands under whiskies, rums, vodka, brandies, gin, beer and ready-to-drink drinks, and also lists juices, vinegars and breakfast foods; English Wikipedia adds glass bottles and malt extract to the company’s products and names Hemant Mohan among its key people. The website lists its branches as Solan, Kasauli, Mohan Gram, Mohan Nagar and Lucknow, gives Mohan Nagar in Ghaziabad as its works, and says its shares are listed on the Calcutta Stock Exchange; English Wikipedia describes it as a public company headquartered in Ghaziabad and listed on the BSE.

The Solan name has a long history inside the company. Its history page says Edward Dyer set up breweries and distilleries at Simla, Solan, Lucknow and Mandalay, that Solan’s spring water, from springs high on Karol mountain, was what drew the brewers there, and that Solan beer was supplied to Allied soldiers during the Second World War. It also says malting carried on at Kasauli after brewing moved to Solan — the same Kasauli site that now supplies the malt spirit.

For a design guide, Solan Gold shows how a long-established maker can present a single malt as a new name built on an old one. Compare Old Monk, Mohan Meakin’s dark rum, and Kamet, a younger Indian single malt named after a Himalayan peak. For this guide we use malt gold, bronze and cask brown with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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