The hotel room had a refrigerator. That is a detail that starts to matter around mid-afternoon, when you have been in a car for six hours and the thought of a cold beer on the balcony becomes specific and insistent.
I was on the way back from a day of sightseeing, my driver navigating the mountain roads down into Munnar, when I asked him to stop somewhere I could buy a couple of beers. He said yes and kept driving. After a few minutes he pulled over on the outskirts of town at a location that gave no indication of what it was. A blank roadside. He pointed at a metal staircase running up the side of a building. “Up there,” he said.
I climbed the stairs to a small platform where about six people were already queuing at two small windows. The system was simple: at the first window you placed your order and paid. At the second you collected. No signage, no branding, nothing visible from the road that would have told you this place existed. Without my driver I would have never found it.
I came away with three cans of British Empire beer. The name is a curious choice for an Indian product, given the effort India put into removing the British Empire from its territory, but Indian beer branding has a relaxed attitude toward historical irony.
Back at the car I looked at the cans. Each one carried three layers of official sealing on top of the manufacturer’s own. A state government hologram sticker across the opening. A tax stamp confirming excise duty paid to Kerala on this specific unit. A maximum retail price correction sticker, because the price printed on the can was set for a different state.
This is not bureaucratic excess. Bootleg alcohol kills people in India with some regularity. Illicitly distilled spirits, sold cheaply and without quality control, cause mass poisonings across the country most years. The multiple seals exist so a buyer can verify the product came through the legal supply chain.
The shop was a Kerala State Beverages Corporation outlet, known locally as Bevco. The state holds a monopoly on alcohol retail: no supermarkets, no convenience stores, no takeaway licenses for restaurants. Only Bevco. The outlets are deliberately unobtrusive, required to be set back from main roads and away from temples and schools. Kerala earns thousands of crore rupees annually from alcohol sales through this monopoly, which funds a portion of the state’s social spending. The inconvenience and the revenue are part of the same arrangement.
I put the cans in the fridge when I got back and went out again for the afternoon. After a long day of sightseeing I opened one on the balcony. The tea hills were catching the last light. British Empire, as it turns out, is a perfectly acceptable lager. None of it would have happened without a driver who knew where to look.
India and Sri Lanka 2026 — all posts
- Day 1 — 24 Hours to Mumbai
- Day 2 — First Morning in Mumbai
- Day 3 — Exploring Mumbai
- Dhobi Ghat: Mumbai’s Laundromat
- Day 4 — Sightseeing in Colombo: One Day is Enough
- A Short History of Ceylon
- Day 5 — Kandy: Moving into the Mountains
- Day 6 — Moving on to Ella
- Day 7 — Hike and Sunstroke
- Tea in Sri Lanka: From a Blight in 1869 to Four Million Cups a Day
- Day 8 — Nine Arches Bridge
- Day 9 — Tuktuk Tour Around Ella
- Day 10 — Time to Leave Ella
- Orphans of Udawalawe: Inside Sri Lanka’s Elephant Transit Home
- Day 11 — Safari and Galle Fort
- Day 12 — Onwards to Negombo for the last day in Sri Lanka
- Day 13 — All the problems concentrated on a single day
- Royal Enfield: Why India Rides Different
- Day 14 — The Kerala Backwaters
- Day 15 — Local bus to Munnar
- Leyland, a familiar name from the past
- Buying a beer in Kerala: Local knowledge required
- Mahindra: The Jeep That Never Left