United Distillers

He's an entrepreneur and a drinks industry leader with more than three decades of experience.

Now, Gaurav's career has taken him through some of the biggest names in the industry, including United Distillers and Vinters, Saab Miller, Diageo, where he built scale brands, teams, distribution networks across some of India's most complex markets.

Now, most recently, he's worked at the intersection of whiskey, brand strategy, and international market development, including the global commercial role with Marylebone Lane Irish Whiskey, where part of his brief was involved being education-driven, whiskey cask investment narrative for India around transparency, governance, and long-term value, which I love.

He's also the founder of Shudder, Reserve Vault of Malts, Braver, and Ardelyn.

After God, these guys are who can make whiskey.

yeah they're the whiskey gods no absolutely why not yeah

yeah uh so you've worked inside organizations like united distillers inventors which i've mentioned you know sav miller and diageo

yeah

Wow.

Yeah, United Distillers-

And I w-

... gave it to 'em.

Um, but I had an opportunity with Tolley Scott and Tolley, um, Pat Tokshu and Nev- Neville Falkenberg were running, uh, Tolley Scott and Tolley those days.

And they were owned by United Distillers, which in turn was owned by Distillers Company, and they decided to, um, [tsk] uh, combine, uh, consolidate all their bottling operations to, uh, Kensington in, in Sydney, where they had 10 spirit lines and they wanted to add Australia's first, um, closed gas, closed inert gas, uh, covered, um, bottling operation for wine.

And, um, at 22 I took the job because I wanted to go to Sydney.

Yep.

Well, they told me.

He's like, it was the United Distillers Their primary goal was to maintain the grain market.

So having these large distilleries sitting around didn't help that purpose because they can always affect the grain price.

So what they do when those guys got into financial trouble, they would buy them, take the malt, shut it down.

At any given time, we may be doing two or three different lines, maybe four sometimes, different lines of work at any given time.

just to maximise because there's a mentality with some of the coopers that if you want to maximise their turnover as well and you might have the same barrel going the same barrel all day long but if it's going for four different customers they think it's a new thing so it's one of those things I was like I'm on the bench myself and just I worked for an internal coop reach which was different Because I worked for United Distillers when I started.

It was owned by Guinness before Guinness and Grand Merged to become Diageo.

So we were kind of guaranteed work there.