The Best-Selling Whisky in the World Is One You Probably Never Heard Of

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In 2014, Officer’s Choice sold 28.4 million 9-liter cases of whisky – about 255 million litres and enough to fill over 100 Olympic-size swimming pools. By comparison, Johnnie Walker sold 17.9 million cases that year. It even outsold Smirnoff vodka, which sold 25.6 million cases.
Why have you not heard of it, or ever (or very rarely) seen it in shops? The whisky accounts for 15% of the total whisky market for India, which is enormous. Indians sure love drinking whisky – they consumed 1.5 billion litres in 2014. That’s a lot of whisky, but it also has to do with India’s enormous population.
Other countries do drink more per capita, with France and (strangely) Uruguay sitting at the top of the countries with the highest per capita rate of whisky guzzling.
Still, 15% of that Indian market is a big number, and that’s where most Officer’s Choice whiskies are sold. The market is also growing rapidly, with a 4% increase in consumption between 2013 and 2014, according to the most recent figures.

How did this whisky brand become one of the top selling spirits in the world? Officer’s Choice was launched in 1988 by BDA Breweries and Distilleries (now Allied Blenders and Distillers). For a while, the company was embroiled in legal battles between the founder-brothers, Kishore and Manu Chhabria. After younger brother Kishore took over BDA, he merged it with Herbertsons, a large whisky company that owned many popular brands run by Vijay Mallya.




The Mallya and (Kishore) Chhabria partnership also eventually broke down and in 2005 Chhabria left Herbertsons but held control of BDA. Sales then exploded as Officer’s Choice was rebranded as an aspirational middle-class drink, featuring new packaging, a more robust distribution network and the release of ‘premium’ versions of the whisky.




It became the third whisky brand in India to achieve over $1 billion of sales in a calendar year (the other two: McDowell’s and Royal Stag). The growing revenue reflects rapidly rising whisky prices as Indian state governments hike taxes, inducing companies to market more toward India’s middle class.
 
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