Could Pakistan beer take edge off relations with India

AWALPINDI, Pakistan — In a country where mullahs ceaselessly denounce Western vices and laws prevent restaurants from offering anything stronger than mocktails or Red Bull, the Murree Brewery somehow perseveres, churning out pallets of lager with an efficiency that would make Milwaukee proud.

A relic of British colonialism, the 152-year-old brewery has survived a 1977 government decree banning tippling by Pakistani Muslims, turning instead to a small but ever-present clientele of non-Muslim foreigners and Christian Pakistanis on the hunt for alcohol-enhanced answers to Pakistan's 100-plus-degree summers.

A recent Pakistani government decision to allow beer exports to non-Muslim countries raises an intriguing prospect: Could Murree beer help relations with nuclear archrival India, a neighbor whose populace has a well-known craving for a cold one?

"Business has to prevail, it has to be the bridge, I would say," Isphanyar Bhandara, chief executive of Murree Brewery, said during an interview at his office, where shelves of Murree offerings as varied as beer and 12-year-old single malt whiskey greet visitors. Government authorities, he continued, "have realized that keeping a lid on alcohol, allowing it in Pakistan but not allowing it to be exported, doesn't make sense. It doesn't make economic sense."

Approval for alcohol exports, a government move aimed at generating more tax revenue, coincides with a recent thaw in ties between Pakistan and India, die-hard enemies since the partition of British colonial India in 1947. The two countries endorsed a most-favored nation agreement this year that fosters trade through the mutual imposition of lower import tariffs and higher import quotas. And Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's visit to India in April was viewed on both sides of the border as an important symbolic gesture.

Murree can now do business with any non-Muslim nation, but India appears to be the likeliest market. Its beer sales are expected to double to almost $9 billion by 2016, according to a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek. In India's northwestern state of Punjab, Murree beer is already routinely smuggled over the border.

Still, Bhandara acknowledges that his marketing department has tough work ahead.

"We are keeping our fingers crossed and shouting at Indian Punjab to import our beer, but it's a hard sell in India," Bhandara said. "They are already producing beer in millions of barrels…. So it's not that we are going to put crates on the border, and people are going to come and quickly snatch it up. We don't see that happening, though we wish it would." (...)