Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka's largest beer maker, Lion Brewery, based in Colombo, which normally produces 160,000 bottles of beer a day, has turned its technical might to producing a very different beverage: potable water for the survivors of the Asian tsunami disaster.

The company stopped making beer after hearing reports that survivors of last Sunday's disaster that killed more than 28,000 people in the tropical island ran the risk of drinking contaminated water, Associated press revealed on January 3, 2005. The company quickly summoned workers and all executives to the bottling plant. The whole plant had to be cleaned and the beer remaining in the system had to be purged.

"We needed every hand because the packing of the water bottles had to be done manually," said Rahim. Beer bottling is 100 per cent mechanized, but the executives found that if they ran the system mechanically, it would also paste the Lion Lager sign on the bottles. "Even our managers got into the act and helped the staff to manually store the bottles in packages," she said.

The production shift by the Lion Brewery didn't come without a few problems -chief of which was that the water still looked like beer because of the colour and labelling of the bottles, a company official said Saturday. "So we then made an urgent request to get white glass bottles and they are now coming," said Naufar Rahim, a senior company executive.

More than one-third of Sri Lanka's coastline was devastated by the tsunami, and seawater contaminated many wells.

After the disaster, the demand for liquor has dropped considerably, Rahim said. "But it is a wonderful feeling that we can make you happy with whatever we produce -good water or good beer," she said.

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