Beer came to Pakistan's lands with the British army. The East India Company took Sindh in 1843 and the Punjab in 1849, the Crown took over India in 1858, and beer shipped from Britain for the garrisons was dear. The Murree Brewery Company was founded in 1860, by a group of army officers and civilians according to the beer historian Martyn Cornell, to brew for the troops at Ghora Gali, a ridge above the Murree hill station more than 1,700 metres up, cold enough to brew before refrigeration; the company's own history adds that it was incorporated a year later. In 1866 it hired Henry Whymper, a brewer from Burton upon Trent, and by 1886 it ran six breweries in British India and Ceylon: at Murree, Kasauli, Nuwara Eliya, Bangalore, Ootacamund and Quetta.
The Quetta brewery opened in 1886 on the slopes of the Chiltan range, ten years after the British took the town, and a brewery and distillery followed at Topi, a mile outside Rawalpindi, in 1889 (the company dates them to 1885-1890). More than 60 per cent of the beer went to the army; in 1899 about thirty Brahui raiders attacked the Quetta brewery and killed eleven of its workers. The company's shares traded in Calcutta by 1902. When water ran short at Murree in the 1920s brewing moved to Rawalpindi, and only the malting stayed at Ghora Gali until the 1940s. The earthquake of 31 May 1935 flattened the Quetta brewery and the company did not rebuild it.
Partition broke the company in two. A mob burned the old brewery at the hill station in 1947, the British and Hindu directors left, and Rawalpindi stopped brewing for a time. Peshotan Bhandara, a Parsi who had distributed its beer, took control, in 1947 by one account and by 1949 by another; his son Minocher ran it until his death in 2008, and his grandson Isphanyar, a member of the National Assembly, runs it now. Being a Parsi firm later helped to keep it alive.
In April 1977 Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto banned the sale of alcohol, and on 9 February 1979 General Zia-ul-Haq's Prohibition Order made selling to Muslims a crime; shops could sell only to non-Muslims and foreigners with permits, and Murree's output fell to about a fifth. Cornell writes that the brewery was shut in 1977-79 until a court held that closing a Parsi firm broke minority rights; NPR says it kept working but could no longer export. In the autumn of 1995 the Sindh High Court, whose province took 70 per cent of the country's liquor sales, stopped both Murree and a new Karachi rival, Beach Brewery of the hotelier Byram Avari, from selling there until December. German canning and bottling lines came in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s Murree beer was brewed under licence in Austria and the Czech Republic.
Murree is now the one large brewer: more than a million cans a month came out of Rawalpindi in 2025, and a second plant works at Hattar. Alcohol brings about half of its turnover, and its legal market is some nine million non-Muslims and foreigners. The only other commercial brewery is Hui Coastal Brewery and Distillery, a Chinese-run plant at Hub in Balochistan, licensed in 2018 and brewing since 2021 with a capacity of up to 100,000 litres a day; there is no craft scene. In 2022 the export policy was changed to allow alcohol exports to countries outside the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and in 2025 Murree received an exclusive licence: in September 2025 it shipped about 30,000 US dollars of beer, to Britain, then Portugal and Japan, the first exports since 1977. For the year to 30 June 2025 its revenue passed 100 million US dollars for the first time, and on 18 September 2026 it reported sales up 12 per cent to 32 billion rupees and net profit up 16 per cent to 3.79 billion for the year to 30 June 2026.
