Zoroastrian Bhandara family-owned Murree Brewery is Pakistan’s only distillery and one of the country’s most successful firms and biggest taxpayers, which hit the headlines in 2007 when it produced the Muslim world’s first 20-year-old malt whisky that a handful of distilleries produce globally
By Sameer Arshad Khatlani
In March 1977, protests over alleged poll fraud ballooned and threatened to bring down the government of Pakistan’s first democratically elected leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He moved quickly to outmanoeuvre his opponents by imposing prohibition in April 1977 and purging Leftists from his Pakistan People’s Party. Bhutto felt prohibition would help prolong his rule by appeasing the conservatives months after publicly accepting he drank. ‘Haan mein sharab peeta hoon [. . .] laikan awam ka khoon nahi peeta [Yes, I drink, but I do not drink the people’s blood],’ he declared at a rally in Lahore.
Pakistan was founded 30 years before the prohibition was imposed as a homeland for Muslims of British India. Islam forbids alcohol, and observant Muslims avoid even indirect association with liquor. Pakistan’s Westernized founding fathers and those who helmed it for the first three decades loved to have a drink and sat on the periodic demands for prohibition.
In neighbouring India, national movement leader Mahatma Gandhi was a proponent of prohibition. The ban on liquor in Gandhi’s home state of Gujarat in 1958 predated prohibition in Pakistan. Only a third of India’s population drinks. Women-led temperance movements have been gaining ground. The prohibition has been extended to more states to check domestic violence, debt, crimes, and road accidents.
People have found ways around the prohibition in both India and Pakistan, where non-Muslim house helps are often hired to buy liquor in their names. Pakistan’s anti-drinking law makes an exception for non-Muslim citizens. They get licences and a quota for drinking. Foreigners are exempted too and can drink in hotels. The rich drink behind the privacy of their high walls. Alcohol flows in elite clubs.
Zoroastrian Bhandara family-owned Murree Brewery, Pakistan’s only distillery, has grown from strength to strength. The company testifies to what the Parsi or Zoroastrian industry as a collective quality has achieved numbers notwithstanding. The Parsi population has been shrinking dramatically. Pakistani Zoroastrians are far fewer, but much like in India, their achievements are extraordinary. They also own Pakistan’s oldest shipping firm, and a chain of hotels, besides being regarded as makers of the country’s financial hub of Karachi
Murree Brewery’s roaring business also attests to the failure of prohibition in Pakistan. It is one of the country’s successful and biggest taxpayers, which doubled its alcohol production in 2016. The profits of Murree Brewery went up by almost 100% since 2012 to reach $19.6 million in 2017. The brewery’s domestic market is supposedly restricted to non-Muslim Pakistanis, expatriates, and foreign tourists. But the company’s output—820 million half-litre bottles of beer, whisky, vodka, brandy, and other alcoholic drinks annually—suggested otherwise.
A non-Muslim could buy six bottles of whisky or one beer case monthly in Punjab and at six out of the country’s seventy licensed liquor shops. The numbers would have been much lower if only non-Muslims drank.
The sales of Murree Brewery would have been even better had it not been for ‘the snob factor’ that is said to also hit sales. In July 2000, Rory McCarthy wrote in The Guardian that the drinks cabinets of the middle classes in Sindh and Punjab often hold the preferred tipple of the elite, Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch, costing £50 in the black market. The rich buy whisky and vodka smuggled from India, the Gulf, and China. Foreign missions are the favourite haunts for the well-connected in Islamabad to get high.
The Murree Brewery counts Bhutto as ‘the biggest consumer of Murree in history’. It has produced eight- and 12-year-old single malts and hit the headlines in February 2007 when it earned the ‘distinction of producing the Muslim world’s first 20-year-old malt whisky’—rarest! A handful of distilleries globally produce 20-year-old malts.
Murree Brewery faces competition from a thriving black market of smuggled, counterfeit, and imported booze. In 2012, it sold 9,00,000 bottles of whisky annually. The bootleggers were estimated to be selling at least two million, much of it fake, per year. Murree competes with lower prices. A bottle of Murree’s premier whisky is almost 50% cheaper than that of Johnny Walker Black Label. The demand for its beer grows in summer; 70% of Murree’s eight million litres are sold from March to July amid blistering heat.
The brewery gets its name from the resort town of Murree, where it was set up in 1860. The brewery was shifted to its current location in Rawalpindi near Pakistan Army headquarters over half a century later. Minocher Bhandra, popularly known as Minoo, took over the reins of his family-run brewery in the 1960s. He diversified it to introduce Murree whisky, vodka, gin, and beer.
Minocher Bhandra’s father was a director at Murree Brewery in 1947 when he bought the controlling interest and became its owner. The brewery exported beer and whiskey to India, Europe, and America until liquor exports were banned in the 1970s.
Minoo prevailed over foreign competitors with the tagline: ‘Have a Murree with your curry.’ He focused on middle-class consumers, who could not afford expensive imported beer and whisky. Murree’s aggressive marketing, its ubiquitous neon-signed billboards, and hoardings in bigger cities, especially Karachi, fuelled sales.
The prohibition in Pakistan killed local brands but Murree survived. The wealth accrued has brought the Bhandras clout. The late Minoo was a member of parliament from a reserved seat meant for non-Muslims. His son, Isphanyar Bhandra, has followed in his footsteps to become a member of the country’s top legislative body.
Minoo was also a member of a council of military ruler Zia ul-Haq. Zia is the Pakistani liberals’ favourite whipping boy whose conservatism is blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the country. Oxford-educated Minoo advised Zia, who introduced the punishment of 80 lashes for drinking alcohol, on minority affairs. The liquor baron became a member of parliament in 1985 during the peak of Zia’s rule. The two got along well. Zia would drop by to meet Minoo. The brewery is located just across from the army chief’s residence in Rawalpindi.
