The Bull That Bowed: Inside Alpha Bull Rum's Open Letter To Old Monk
Mumbai, 10 August 2026: A single regulatory action took six alcohol brands off shelves this month, among them Old Monk, India's 71-year-old rum icon. Nine-month-old Maharashtra challenger Alpha Bull Rum had every reason to treat the gap as an opening. It published an open letter instead.
- Trigger: An FSSAI regulatory action removed six alcohol brands from shelves, including Old Monk
- Response: Alpha Bull Rum published "Dear Monk," an open letter addressed to Old Monk
- Agency: Roll Dot, a London- and Mumbai-based creative agency
- Brand: Alpha Bull Rum, a nine-month-old label from Konkan Agro Group, whose tagline is "Charge Ahead"
The Story Behind The Letter
When the FSSAI action pulled six alcohol brands off shelves, Old Monk among them, the obvious assumption was that Alpha Bull Rum had been handed the opportunity every challenger waits for. Before writing a single line of copy, Roll Dot did something else first: it read the internet. What the team found reframed the brief. What had started as a question about shelf space quietly became a question about memory.
The internet did not turn against Old Monk. Loyalists stayed loyalists. Most conversations were not about the brand; they were about where to find remaining stock. What Old Monk had built over seven decades was not simply a customer base, it was a cult. People were not looking for explanations, they were looking for bottles. It felt less like outrage than absence.
Alpha Bull Rum's response was an open letter, addressed not to consumers but to Old Monk itself. In a category increasingly written for the scroll and three-second hooks, the brand chose to write long instead. The letter closes on a line the team kept returning to: "Even a Bull bows to a Monk."
It raises a question worth asking of the category more broadly: maybe people never stopped reading. Maybe brands just stopped giving them a reason to.
What The Brand And The Agency Said
"Old Monk isn't just another competitor. It's the reason a Maharashtra-made rum even has a shelf worth fighting for. We could have made the campaign about ourselves. It didn't feel right," said Vedant Jaiswal, CEO of Konkan Agro Group.
"Every version of the brief was some form of 'seize the opportunity.' That felt wrong in the room. The conversation kept drifting to hostel stories, army stories, someone's dad. Somewhere along the way we stopped talking about a product. So we wrote a letter instead," said Tejali Shete, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Roll Dot.
Alpha Bull's line is "Charge Ahead." Dear Monk redefines what that can mean: not charging through an open door, but knowing when to hold it open instead for the brand that walked through it first.
Every challenger eventually gets the moment its biggest rival stumbles. Most celebrate. Alpha Bull Rum chose to acknowledge before it chose to compete. In a category built on claiming market share, a nine-month-old brand chose to begin by giving away respect.
"Dear Monk," In Full
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