1121 Basmati Rice

8.30–8.40 mm milled — the Gulf length benchmark

1121 is the variety the Gulf rice trade sets its benchmark against, and it earns that on one measurement: average milled grain length of 8.30–8.40 mm, extending to roughly 19–20 mm cooked. No other commercially traded basmati elongates like it — the ratio is around 2.3× against roughly 1.9× for the Pusa varieties — and in a market where the grain is visible in the pack and on the plate, that is what the premium buys. Released from the IARI programme in 2003 and now the dominant export variety out of Haryana, Punjab and Pakistani Punjab, it contracts at broken ≤ 1% or ≤ 2%, moisture ≤ 13%, variety purity ≥ 95%, damaged and discoloured ≤ 1%, and ageing of 12–24 months with the crop year declared. The four commercial forms are Golden Sella (parboiled, amber, the biryani and high-volume kitchen grade), White or Creamy Sella (milder soak, paler), Steam (hardened, cooks separate, keeps a white grain) and Raw White (most aroma-forward, least forgiving).

You pay for 1121 when the grain is seen and measured — retail packing for Saudi, UAE, Iran, Iraq and the wider Gulf, premium biryani programmes, gifting packs, and any contract where the buyer's QC will put a lot under a length gauge on arrival. Where it stops making sense is a cooked dish in which length is destroyed and nobody is paying for it: 1509 delivers the same aroma family at 7.60–7.90 mm for materially less money, and for institutional feeding, long-grain white does the job at roughly a third of the price. The two disputes that recur on 1121 are ageing and admixture, and both are measurable — fresh-milled 1121 cooks sticky and will not elongate whatever the variety on the contract says, and a lot averaging 7.9 mm is not 1121 no matter how it is labelled. CBIL contracts against SGS grading of average milled length, broken, moisture, admixture and crop year at load port, in 25 kg and 50 kg PP bags, container-load, on FOB, CFR and CIF terms.