Bandarful

Bandarful is a cold brew coffee liqueur produced in Kashipur, Uttarakhand, India, at the Himmaleh Spirits Distillery. Named for and inspired by the Nepal gray langur (bandar in Hindi)—a playful monkey endemic to the Himalayas—Bandarful is crafted to exude the same frolicking joy as a barrel of monkeys.

Himmaleh Spirits was established in 2023 by Ansh Khanna and Samarth Prasad. The independent, eco-friendly distillery is located on a four-acre, family-owned estate nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas and was designed with a focus on sustainability to ensure zero liquid and waste discharge. The Himalayan Mountain range that surrounds the distillery is part of a mountainous region known as the Third Pole because its mountain glaciers and snowfields store more frozen water than anywhere in the world outside of the Arctic and Antarctic polar ice caps. This abundant reserve of freshwater feeds into ten major river basins, providing the Himalayan spring water used by the distillery.

For Bandarful, Himmaleh Spirits uses hand-picked Arabica coffee sourced from Chikmagalur in southwest India, a region known as the birthplace of Indian coffee. Unique to Bandarful is the processing of the coffee cherries, which utilizes all three of the major coffee processes: washed, natural, and honey. These processes are used to separate the coffee fruit from the bean, and they affect brewed coffee’s overall texture, sweetness, and acidity. Since portions of the beans are each processed differently, the widest possible range of flavors can be expressed and captured in each batch of Bandarful.

Bandarful’s base spirit—distilled from 100% rice grown locally in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand—is distilled in small batches using traditional copper pot stills. After combining the cold-brewed coffee with this spirit, Bandarful is sweetened using Indian muscovado, a mineral-rich, molasses-heavy sugar. Try Bandarful chilled over ice, poured over coffee, or in cocktails such as an Espresso Martini or Revolver.

For Himmaleh Spirits’ range of cocktail-friendly Indian gins, see Jin Jiji.