Lone Pakistani Brewery Tapping Overseas Markets to Stay Afloat

Talk about a tough market.

M.P. Bhandara is the chief of Pakistan’s only brewery. And the fruits of his work--whiskey, rum, gin and beer--are off-limits to 97% of Pakistanis.

In a country of 140 million, Bhandara is permitted to sell his brew in only 12 shops. On the other side of the concrete walls of his Rawalpindi brewery, fundamentalist Muslims are calling for the demise of his business.

“We are on the razor’s edge,” Bhandara, 61, said between sips of beer during a lunchtime interview in his office. “The government’s liquor policy could change at any time.”

Bhandara’s enterprise, the Murree Brewery Co., has held exclusive rights to produce and sell alcoholic beverages in Pakistan since the country gained its independence from Britain in 1947.

The setup isn’t quite the boon that its monopoly status suggests: As an Islamic republic, Pakistan forbids all Muslims from buying or selling any sort of alcoholic beverages. Violators are occasionally flogged.

That leaves the 3% of Pakistanis who are followers of other religions, mainly the Christian, Sikh, Hindu or, in the case of Bhandara, Zoroastrian faiths. Each month, the government doles out ration coupons--”fig leaves,” Bhandara calls them--that enable non-Muslim adults to buy enough beer or spirits to satisfy even the heaviest drinkers.

Alcohol is available in some Pakistani hotels, but only to foreigners who can prove their nationality--and then only in their rooms.

To be sure, prohibition in Pakistan often seems as hapless as America’s in the 1920s. Alcohol flows freely in many upper- and middle-class homes in Pakistan, even in the homes of government officials. And prohibition has spawned a busy black market, which flourishes just outside the alcohol shops themselves.

But it’s hardly big or reliable enough to match Bhandara’s dreams.

So he is looking abroad--but not to export, because Pakistani law forbids that too. This month, his firm is beginning limited production of Murree beer in a brewery in Salzburg, Austria, for sale in Britain.

More than a million people of Pakistani and Indian descent live in Britain. More important, the country boasts about 6,500 Indian and Pakistani restaurants--which have raised curry and beer to the level of national meal.

Bhandara even has a catchy slogan ready for the British billboards: “With Curry, Drink Murree.”

“It’s a matter of taste and the mind,” Bhandara said. “If you are eating a curry, you will want to drink a beer from the Subcontinent. If you eat Chinese food, you have a Tsingtao. Otherwise, why go to an ethnic-type restaurant?”

The first run in Salzburg will produce about 50,000 cases of beer. If it succeeds, Bhandara said, he would like to take the beer to other expatriate outposts--New York, Toronto and Los Angeles.

A group of British colonialists founded the brewery in 1861, in the Punjabi hill station of Murree in northern Pakistan. A Muslim mob burned it to the ground in 1948, and the brewery moved for good to Rawalpindi.

Bhandara, a former member of the Pakistani parliament, has worked for Murree for most of his adult life. His family owns about 45% of the company stock, while the rest is traded on the Karachi Stock Exchange.

The Murree Brewery’s struggles mirror the region’s tumultuous half-century. Alcohol was permitted under British rule, and the brewery, as part of British India, sold its beer throughout the Subcontinent. When the British partitioned India and Pakistan in 1947, Murree’s market shrank to East and West Pakistan. When East Pakistan seceded and became Bangladesh in 1971, another Murree market disappeared.

“It’s been downhill for 50 years,” Bhandara said.

The fortunes of the Murree Brewery have especially shriveled under the Islamic revival that has swept the Middle East and South Asia. Officials in the Northwest Frontier Province banned the sale of alcohol altogether.

Murree’s balance sheets tell the story: In 1945, the brewery produced about 500,000 cases of beer a year. Today, it makes about 200,000. With the doctrinaire Taliban movement ascendant in Afghanistan and the religious parties in Pakistan gaining ground, Bhandara sees his future going dry.

“The first thing an Islamic government will do is shut down that brewery,” said Syadul Arifeen, headmaster of Markaz Uloom Islamia, a fundamentalist school in Peshawar.

To avoid provoking authorities, Bhandara limits his advertising to tabletop coasters. The few stores allowed to sell alcohol are pathetic affairs, with one shop in Rawalpindi banished to a back alley and accorded all the status of an X-rated arcade.

Still, for all the threats by fundamentalists, many Pakistanis speak of a more tolerant brand of Islam practiced by the majority of the people. They like to remind foreigners that Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, savored an occasional tumbler of whiskey.

Bhandara acknowledged that a large part of his income probably flows from the shadow market. It’s why, he says, Pakistan’s laws against drinking seem so out of touch with the modern world.

“The Muslims like to drink more than anyone,” said Tahir Mahmood Awan, a Christian who says he often sells alcohol to his Muslim friends. “If they want to have a party, we produce the alcohol for them. It’s a good business.”