News Desk
ISLAMABAD — In a country where ordering a beer in public can provoke scandal — or worse — the survival of Pakistan’s oldest company is an improbable story of adaptation, contradiction and quiet defiance.
Murree Brewery, founded in 1860 under British rule, stands as one of the subcontinent’s oldest industrial institutions. Yet it operates in a nation where 97 percent of citizens are legally barred from consuming alcohol, where public morality is policed with fervour, and where political parties routinely invoke Islamic identity as a shield against modernity.
The brewery’s director, 30‑year‑old Isphanyar Bhandara, understands the paradox better than most. “In this country,” he says, “it is more honourable to be caught killing someone than having a glass of beer in your hand.” It is a line delivered half in jest, half in resignation — and entirely reflective of the country’s uneasy relationship with its own laws.
Murree Brewery’s fortunes have long risen and fallen with Pakistan’s political tides. After the September 11 attacks, the surge of Islamic parties, emboldened by global events and domestic anxieties, brought renewed scrutiny to anything deemed un‑Islamic. Alcohol, predictably, became an easy target.
Sales dipped. Distribution tightened. Public rhetoric sharpened.
Yet the brewery endured.
Pakistan’s political class often champions Islamic revivalism, but the state’s economic behaviour tells a different story. When money is involved, the boundaries of piety blur. Murree Brewery remains a profitable, tax‑paying enterprise — and successive governments, even the most religiously conservative, have quietly relied on its revenue.
It is a familiar pattern in Pakistan: Islamic identity is invoked loudly in public, but quietly negotiated in private when the state’s financial interests are at stake.
Pakistan’s alcohol laws are a study in selective enforcement. Non‑Muslims may legally purchase alcohol, but the system is riddled with loopholes, informal networks and a thriving black market. Elite Pakistanis, politicians, businessmen, are known to indulge behind closed doors, while publicly condemning the very behaviour they privately enjoy.
Murree Brewery operates within this moral maze, producing beer, whisky and vodka for a clientele that officially should not exist. Its products are sold discreetly in licensed shops, consumed in private homes, and smuggled into gatherings where the country’s cultural contradictions are on full display.
The company has diversified into fruit juices, glass manufacturing and other ventures to cushion itself against political volatility. But its core business remains alcohol, a fact that places it in perpetual tension with Pakistan’s shifting religious landscape.
Murree Brewery is more than a business. It is a symbol of Pakistan’s unresolved identity crisis, a country torn between its puritanical self‑image and the economic realities it cannot escape.
Its continued existence reveals a truth that politicians rarely admit:
Pakistan’s moral rigidity bends easily when confronted with financial necessity. In that sense, the brewery is not an anomaly. It is a mirror.
