Pakistani worker checks a line of beer cans at the Muree Brewery Company in Rawalpindi. PHOTO: AFP

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE > PAKISTAN
By AFP Published: September 12, 2016

RAWALPINDI: At Murree Brewery, home of Pakistan’s national lager, vintage copper boilers belch odorous fumes as they churn out 10 million litres of beer each year.

Hundreds of tons of gin and whisky are stored in climate-conditioned cellars, shielded from the pummelling sun.

Whether it’s beer produced by the crateful in Murree’s venerable red brick brewery — opposite the powerful army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi — or wine discreetly fermented in a bedroom, alcohol sales are booming in “teetotalitarian” Pakistan.

Strangers to the Islamic Republic may be surprised that the country industriously — and at Murree openly — produces such quantities of booze, despite it being forbidden to 97% of the population.

But although Pakistani Muslims are banned from drinking alcohol, topers take advantage of the fact that the country’s minorities, mainly Hindus and Christians, face no such prohibition, and often snaffle up their quota.

And so although officially only three million adults can buy alcohol, the country’s three breweries must work hard to please the nation’s enthusiastic tipplers.

Murree produces two cask-aged whiskies and a gin dyed an electric blue — not coincidentally exactly the shade of bottles containing its more internationally renowned counterpart, Bombay Sapphire.

Kamal questions Altaf’s ‘mental ailment’

Founded by the British in 1860 and now Parsee-owned, Murree brewery has been burnt down by Muslim protesters, temporarily shut down in an extremist purge and and continues to survive prohibition, which was imposed in the 1970s.

Far from bowed, it flourishes as one of Pakistan’s most successful companies, with an annual growth of between 15% to 20%, a rarity in a country regularly wracked by extremist violence.

“There is no risk as such, because we are a very very legal entity — one of the biggest taxpayers in this country,” said Major Sabih-ur-Rehman, a brewery executive.

“It is in the interest of everybody that the Murree brewery as a legal business should flourish and continue.”

With cans priced at 300 rupees ($3) on the legal market in a country where the average salary is 13,000 ($130), the brewery caters mainly to a Muslim elite willing to break the rules.

US bans antibacterial soap chemicals over health risks

Tahir Ahmed, a therapist specialising in addiction, who is worried about the rise in alcoholism, says that off licence stores “sell the booze to the people who can afford it, and only Muslims can”.

“The middle class is steeped in Islamic morality, but the upper class are getting richer, and it is a new norm that if you invite someone for dinner you will be serving alcohol. It is socially expected.”

Well stocked bars at birthday parties, dinners awash with Italian wines and discreet “car-bars” in the parking lots of wedding halls are supplied by a thriving blackmarket that also relies on vast foreign imports.

“The main source of smuggling is through Dubai on launches crossing the sea,” a customs official who did not wish to be named told AFP.

SOURCE:   http://epaper.pknewspapers.com/the-express-tribune.html