The Rise and Fall of Bira 91: How Ankur Jain Built India’s Coolest Beer Brand and Lost It All

On July 21, 2026, Ankur Jain wrote a letter. It was addressed to the stakeholders of B9 Beverages, the parent company of Bira 91, the brand he had spent 18 years of his life building from a Belgian import business into India’s most disruptive craft beer brand. In it, he confirmed that he and his family would be stepping away from the board and their executive positions with immediate effect. He apologised to employees. He acknowledged the pain the company’s financial crisis had caused. And he said he believed stepping aside was the right outcome for both the company and himself.

What followed the letter was silence from the man who had turned “Bira 91” into a word that meant something in urban India and analysis from everyone else. This is the story of how that brand was built, and what brought it to this moment.

The Delhi Boy Who Found Beer in Chicago

Ankur Jain was born in 1981 in New Delhi, into a family of creative professionals. His father was an architect and urban planner, a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe admirer whose work influenced how Ankur would later think about design and aesthetics. His mother was an author and interior designer.

He came to Illinois Institute of Technology from New Delhi to study computer science and architecture, inspired by his father. The first taste of craft beer for Ankur Jain was a swig of Anchor Steam, a nineteenth-century recipe, in a course about the Industrial Revolution. His cultural exposure to craft beer, South Side jazz, and contemporary art made an impact.

“The flexibility that Chicago and Illinois Tech gave me to color outside the box was very unique,” Ankur later recalled.

After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science in 2002, Ankur Jain’s early career included a stint at Motorola, before entrepreneurship came calling. His first entrepreneurial venture was in the healthcare sector, co-founding ReliantMD, a healthcare revenue cycle management company in New York City, which he successfully exited after four years.

He had made money. He had built and sold something. And then, in 2006, he moved back to India.

When Ankur Jain decided to sell the software company and move back to India, he found the cultural acclimatization process even more jarring than when he had moved to Chicago for college. One factor was the stark absence of the craft beer culture that was catching fire stateside. That absence became his thesis.

The Import Years: Learning the Market With Other People’s Beer

Before there was Bira 91, there was Cerana Beverages. Ankur Jain started importing and distributing premium craft beer brands from Belgium, Germany, and the US through Cerana Beverages from 2009. The brands he imported Chimay, Duvel, Brooklyn Brewery, were among the finest craft beers in the world, already beloved by beer enthusiasts in Europe and the US.

He brought them to India and began seeding the market: getting them into restaurants, bars, and hotels in Delhi, building relationships with the hospitality industry, and educating bartenders, sommeliers, and consumers about what good beer could taste like.

He spent four years learning which of those seminal brews were received best by Indian consumers, “the most expensive focus group in history,” Jain later called it before deciding to begin producing his own beer.

That 4 year education was the foundation of everything Bira 91 became. He was not a beer founder who had an idea and hired experts to execute it. He had spent 4 years inside the market, understanding the consumer, the distribution chain, the regulatory complexity of alcohol in India, and the precise flavour profiles that resonated with young, urban, upwardly mobile Indian drinkers.

When he launched his own brand, he knew exactly who he was making it for.

2015: The Launch and the Name

Bira 91 launched in 2015. The name carries two deliberate signals. “Bira” is derived from the Punjabi word for brother – conversational, warm, not corporate. “91” is India’s international dialling code. Put together, the name said what the brand stood for: an Indian beer, made for India, by someone who had seen the world and chosen to come home.

He started this business in 2009 as an import business and by 2015 was producing his own beer. The brand initially imported Belgian craft beers before embracing the Make in India initiative and setting up production facilities in Madhya Pradesh and Nagpur.

The early products, Bira White and Bira Blonde were deliberately different from what India was drinking. Kingfisher had owned the Indian beer market for decades: a standard lager, golden in colour, reliable in flavour, dominant in distribution. Bira White was a wheat beer with a soft, spicy, citrus finish. Bira Blonde was a light lager with a clean, approachable profile.

Ankur Jain described Bira as “smart and fun at the same time, but not pretentiously so.” It was a beer that could sit in Hauz Khas Village on a Friday night and also appear at an airport lounge on a Monday morning without feeling out of place.

The brand was an immediate hit in Delhi. Then in Mumbai. Then nationally.

The Capital Raises: Building on the Froth

Bira’s growth attracted serious money, quickly. Ankur Jain initially raised $1.5 million from friends, followed by a $6 million Series A round in 2016 led by Sequoia Capital, its first investment in the alcohol beverage segment in India.

That Sequoia bet was significant. It gave Bira the credibility that venture-backed status confers in India’s startup ecosystem, and it opened doors to subsequent capital. Investors from across the world lined up, Kirin Holdings of Japan, Sequoia India (now Peak XV), Tiger Pacific, Sixth Sense, and others bet on India’s craft beer revolution.

Bira raised more than $252 million in total funding through 2024 from investors including Peak XV Partners, Sofina Ventures, Kirin Holdings, and MUFG Bank.

At its peak, Bira was valued at nearly Rs 4,400 crore in the unlisted market with unlisted shares trading at Rs 950 to 1000 each, the hallmark of a brand on the brink of an IPO. The company clocked Rs 824 crore in revenue in FY23. It was present across 550 towns in India and 18 countries. It sponsored the ICC T20 World Cup and 5 IPL teams. It appeared in cricket stadiums, music festivals, and airport lounges.

Bira was everywhere. And for a moment, it felt unstoppable.

The Acquisitions: Betting Beyond Beer

With capital in hand and confidence running high, Ankur Jain began expanding Bira’s footprint beyond its core product.

In 2022, B9 Beverages acquired The Beer Cafe, an alco-beverage chain operating 42 outlets, through an all-stock transaction. The acquisition was positioned as a vertical integration play: a craft beer brand owning the physical spaces where its customers consumed it. In theory, it created a captive distribution channel and an experiential retail footprint.

The company also hired BCG for a consultancy project focused on improving efficiency, reportedly valued at Rs 10 crore, while simultaneously preparing for a public listing, a combination of expenses that industry insiders later identified as emblematic of the spending decisions that deepened the financial crisis.

Meanwhile, Bira maintained full end-to-end control over manufacturing, distribution, and secondary sales through its own on-roll manpower. A strategy that didn’t work well for Bira, the model was capital-intensive, operationally complex, and left the company exposed to any disruption in the regulatory or financial environment with almost no buffer.

The Decision That Unravelled Everything

In late 2023, as Bira prepared for a 2026 IPO, it made a decision that became the single most consequential operational mistake in the company’s history.

The company changed its legal name in 2024 from B9 Beverages Private Limited to B9 Beverages Limited ahead of a planned IPO. This name change required the re-registration of products with state excise authorities, causing 4 to 7 months of complete business disruption.

The Indian alcohol industry operates through a labyrinthine state-by-state excise regulatory system, where each product must be individually licensed in each state it is sold. Changing the legal entity name triggered a re-registration requirement across all states simultaneously.

Production halted in July 2024. Warehouses overflowed with expired beer. Retailers in NCR and Mumbai ran dry, with some reporting zero Bira stock for six months. Distributors refused new orders, fearing regulatory penalties. Employees called it “an invisible lockdown.” Despite strong consumer demand, the company simply could not sell.

Competitors like Simba, BeeYoung, White Owl, and Kingfisher Ultra quickly grabbed shelf space, cementing their hold while Bira remained trapped in paperwork.

The production halt cascaded into a cash crisis almost immediately. Without revenue flowing in, the company could not service its debt. Without debt service, lenders began exercising their rights. Without cash, salaries went unpaid.

Read More: Name Change Costs Bira 91 Maker ₹80 Crore in Inventory Woes

The Financial Reality: A Company Under Water

The numbers behind Bira’s crisis are stark and worth stating clearly.

In FY24, B9 Beverages reported a net loss of Rs 748 crore on revenue of Rs 638 crore, alongside negative cash flows of Rs 84 crore. Total accumulated losses reached Rs 1,904 crore, while liabilities exceeded assets by over Rs 619 crore as of March 31, 2024. Sales volumes fell sharply to 6 to 7 million cases in FY24 from 9 million in the previous year.

The most recent independent auditor report for FY24 flagged various concerns, including the fact that current liabilities exceeded assets by Rs 487 crore. The auditors also noted that B9 Beverages’ Belgium and Singapore units had outstanding loans worth Rs 168 crore and Rs 213.3 crore respectively, and that the net worth of the subsidiaries was substantially eroded.

The CFO situation did not help. Multiple CFO transitions took place in rapid succession, when one CFO stepped away in July 2025, a returning CFO who had previously served from 2015 to 2019 was brought back. Former CFOs, speaking anonymously, cited discord in the way financial audits were conducted as a reason for their departures.

The Employee Petition: When the Inside Spoke Out

The most damaging development for Ankur Jain’s reputation was not a missed loan repayment or an auditor’s flag. It was a letter from inside his own company.

In October 2025, more than 250 current and former employees of B9 Beverages formally petitioned the board and key investors, including Kirin Holdings and Peak XV Partners, seeking the removal of founder and CEO Ankur Jain. The petition alleged corporate governance failures, lack of transparency, and prolonged delays in employee salaries and statutory dues.

Former employees accused management of running the company like a family proprietorship, with all power concentrated among Ankur Jain, his mother, and his wife, the 3 promoter directors on the board. The Bira 91 board comprised Ankur Jain as the CEO and founder, his wife Ankeeta Pawa as a promoter director, and his mother Shashi Jain as a promoter director, alongside nominee directors from Kirin Holdings, Sofina, Sixth Sense Ventures, and Peak XV.

The governance structure, 3 family members occupying three of the promoter board seats had worked fine during the growth phase. It became a liability when the crisis hit and investors needed independent decision-making authority that did not flow through the same family that was the subject of the complaints.

The Investor Side: Pressure from Multiple Directions

For much of the past year, investors and shareholders in Bira had been pressing for a change in management at the troubled beer maker. Ankur Jain was informed that any potential rescue of the company would be contingent on his stepping aside to allow external professionals to take charge, a move he was reportedly reluctant to make for a prolonged period.

Kirin Holdings, Bira’s largest shareholder with 20.1% stake, was exploring exit options. In October 2025, Kirin Holdings and Anicut Capital jointly took possession of shares in BTB (Better Than Before), the company that operates The Beer Cafe chain of 42 outlets, after taking over shares pledged as collateral. The Beer Cafe, the crown jewel acquisition of Bira’s expansion phase had been repossessed by lenders before the founder’s exit was even finalised.

The Settlement: July 21, 2026

In a letter dated July 21, 2026, Ankur Jain confirmed that the settlement with lenders had been reached after negotiations involving close to 30 stakeholders with “genuinely different, often competing interests.” Under the settlement, Jain and his family would step away from the board and executive positions immediately. All claims and litigation between stakeholders would be withdrawn. Personal guarantees given by Jain against corporate loans taken to support the company would be released.

“Bira 91 needs fresh capital, a clear balance sheet, and a management team that can build the next phase without the weight of everything that came before,” Jain wrote. He said he would continue supporting the brand from the sidelines.

The settlement clears the way for an investor-led recapitalisation. Existing investors and lenders are expected to inject fresh capital and work towards restarting operations over the next three to six months.

Read more: Bira 91 Founder Ankur Jain Steps Down from Board After Stakeholder Settlement

What Happens to Bira 91 Now

The brand itself is not going away. The settlement explicitly provides for investor-led recapitalisation and a management team that will take the company into its next phase.

The question for Bira’s new leadership is whether the brand equity accumulated over 11 years of building India’s most visible craft beer identity is still intact enough to rebuild on. The answer is probably yes, partly. Bira 91’s brand recall among its core urban consumer base remains strong. The product was always genuinely good, and the production halt created a demand vacuum that the market did not fill with a single dominant alternative.

But shelf space lost to Simba, White Owl, and BeeYoung during Bira’s six-month absence from retailers is not automatically recovered with a relaunch. Distribution relationships fractured during the crisis, with distributors refusing new orders due to regulatory concerns will need to be rebuilt on new trust, not old brand memory.

What This Means for India’s Craft Beer Market

Bira 91’s crisis is a cautionary chapter for India’s emerging craft beer industry. The company proved that a premium, differentiated beer brand could be built in India and win at scale against global incumbents. It proved that Indian consumers would pay a premium for a product that felt authentically Indian and aspirationally modern simultaneously.

It also proved that those brand strengths cannot compensate for regulatory fragility, governance concentration, and cash burn that consistently outpaces revenue growth in a highly regulated industry where the government controls pricing and distribution in most states.

The craft beer market that Bira 91 did more than any other brand to create is still growing. Simba, White Owl, Great State Aleworks, and dozens of microbreweries are all beneficiaries of the consumer education Bira invested in over a decade. The category Ankur Jain built will outlast the corporate crisis that led to his exit.