The barter of freshly filled, re-used bottles, with a proclamation of ‘this is the best urrak’ (usually from the villages in Quepem and Canacona), is how greetings are exchanged this time of the year among locals. For a fleeting few weeks in April and May, this lightly spiked precursor to Feni has a parched Goan population (including us) literally on the boil.
To drink urrak is to know how — best appreciated at its source, this first-distill fruity, fermented drink is what would eventually be bottled as Feni, after second distillation.
First distill of cashew juice at Dudhsagar Plantation.
| Photo Credit:
Karuna Amarnath
Urrak done right, in a lemonade with salt and chilli.
| Photo Credit:
Karuna Amarnath
Plantation visits are the final threshold for gatekeepers of this uniquely Goan heritage, and the debate amongst distillers is whether to just lay it all out for a visitor experience. Of course, at a time where ‘farm to table’ is the culinary aspiration, it is hard to argue why not
Urrak plantation hopping
Urrak plantation hopping
| Video Credit:
The Hindu
Four generations in Cotombi
One of the biggest stakeholders in South Goa and the man behind the beautifully crafted Tinto Feni bottles, Solomon Diniz explains to us that urrak comes with a caveat for people such as himself. “During these two months of the year, sales of all our other premium liquors drop drastically,” he laughs, “Everyone is only drinking freshly brewed urrak!” For aficionados, however, there is always a little stashed away for a true test of taste at his thoughtfully calibrated Tinto Expressions Tavern in Quepem.
Tinto Expressions Tavern
| Photo Credit:
Karuna Amarnath
Traditional bhaan at Tinto Expressions Tavern
| Photo Credit:
Karuna Amarnath
The road to get there is nostalgic in every sense of the word — terraced paddy fields now glowing gold in the summer sun, and countless mango trees, still laden with fruit, harken back to a Goa that hasn’t changed — a landscape that lumbers on at its own pace. Cotombi, where the Diniz family has been distilling since the late 1800s, is exactly this: a village that has never felt the need to explain itself. The cashew fruit comes from their own farm. There is something special about the urrak that has been produced the same way over four generations. We had a second glass. We could easily have had another.
Fifty acres and a philosophy
Not every story of urrak is told from a position of scale. Some are quieter, more intimate, and take decades to arrive at something meaningful. In an era where every harvest finds its way onto a screen, the pressures on tradition are quietly relentless. Miles from the coastal roads of South Goa, deep in the folds of the Western Ghats, the sun-baked laterite soil — hard, unyielding, red-rust — wouldn’t seem like the ideal setting for a horticultural experiment. For Ajit Malkarnekar, however, 50 acres of barren land in Karmane village in the 1980s was a challenge he was willing to bet on. Today, his family’s Dudhsagar Plantation, on the fringe of Mollem National Park, is an impossibly dense thicket of tropical green.
Proprietor Ajit Malkarnekar of Dudhsagar Plantation, with garafaos of OURO spiced Feni.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Dudhsagar Plantation
Cashew crushed underfoot at Dudhsagar Plantation, Goa.
| Photo Credit:
Karuna Amarnath
A cacophony of birdcall, the smell of ripened cashew fruit — and we could almost taste the freshly brewed urrak before it arrived at our table. Ajit’s son Ashok showed us their own small-scale copper bhaan where the urrak is drawn, the cottage-style fermentation vats, the workings of a circular-living system in which nothing is wasted and everything has a purpose — and he explained it all with an unhurried, measured delivery. Ashok speaks of it with the same conviction as his father suggests: the next generation has not merely inherited this outlook; they have chosen it. The Malkarnekar philosophy is essentially: know your trees, know your fruit, don’t rush anything. In an era of instant everything, this feels almost radical.
Ashok, Ajit Malkarnekar’s son, whose family owns the Dudhsagar Plantation.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Dudhsagar Plantation
A fanatical ‘Feni dotor’
It was this same reverence for origins that sent us looking for answers of a different kind — not how urrak is made, but where the word itself comes from. At a recent symposium, self-styled ‘Feni dotor’ (doctor, in Konkani parlance) Hansel Vaz, of Cazulo pedigree, traced the roots of the word urrak — also referred to historically as hurrak, urrac and urraca — with its obvious links to other vernacular spirits across the Asian continent.
Tracing the history of urrak with Hansel Vaz.
| Photo Credit:
Karuna Amarnath
In his typically enthusiastic style, Vaz made a case for an older etymology, one that traces its roots to the sap of the coconut tree and its proliferation across the region through trade with the Arabic world. “The early references do not point to a cashew distillate at all,” he insists. However, given its short season and unmistakable fragrance, the juice of the cashew fruit successfully ‘hijacked’ the vocabulary with its saccharine sweetness. Sitting under a jackfruit tree on a sweltering April afternoon with a glass of fresh urrak, we were not going to complain.
The urrak experience starts at ₹750 and is available only during the cashew harvest season from March-May. Details on tours at adincodistilleries.com and dudhsagarplantation.com.
The writers are Goa-based raconteurs of unhurried cultural experiences.
Published – May 02, 2026 07:00 am IST
