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Food & Beverage Industry

A microbrewery grows in Palestine

Modern Brewery Age, July 19, 1999 by Jessica Steinberg

Nadim Khoury straddles political and religious borders with his microbrewery, the first in the Middle East

In the town of Taybeh, just down the hill from Ramallah, the defacto capital of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank of Israel, sits the first microbrewery in the Middle East, brainchild of Nadim Khoury, a Palestinian entrepreneur with a great love for beer.

A microbrewery would seem to be an unlikely venture for the fledgling Palestinian economy, particularly given its mostly Muslim population that abides by the religious ban on drinking alcohol. But Khoury doesn't seem concerned partly because Taybeh is a Christian village but mostly because he doesn't think of himself as an alcohol producer.

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"I only make hand-crafted, naturally alcoholic beer," he says of his light, 5% alcohol, amber-colored beer.

The father of four returned to Taybeh four years ago after nearly two decades in Boston, where he owned a chain of liquor stores with his brother David and worked on perfecting his beer recipe. He came back to Taybeh after the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993, one of the approximately 12,000 Palestinian families who returned to the region to help kickstart the emerging Palestinian economy.

Khoury, an affable 39-year-old with a wide grin, first discovered his passion for beer while studying business administration at Hellenic College in Brookline, Massachusetts, just around the time when the U.S. began its big boom of home brewing a microbrewing.

"I was always reading about beer and home brewing and I used to go to exhibitions, beer fairs and taste events," he says, "tasting and learning as much as possible."

On a few visits home to Taybeh, Khoury brought some home-brewing kits for friends and family and the taste for beer was planted among the traditionally arak-imbibing population. By 1995, he was back in Taybeh, setting up the state-of-the-art, fully automatic $1.2 million Taybeh Brewing Co., a three-way partnership of Nadim, his brother David and their father, a well-to-do landowner.

Taybeh is a simple Arab town, with a winding main street that meanders up the hill, dotted with a couple of grocery stores, a beauty parlor and some unidentified storefronts. It seems an unlikely site for a microbrewery, until visitors encounter a large, American-style billboard, with an arrow that points the direction toward "Taybeh Beer - The Finest in the Middle East."

At the top of the hill sits the brewery's white, two-story building, a simple concrete space filled with brewing tanks from Italy and kegs and cases of Taybeh Beer. Operated by 12 full-time Palestinian workers, the brewery's bottling line can produce 5,000 bottles an hour, while the four tanks can handle double to triple that volume. At the moment, Khoury is operating well below capacity due to distribution limitations.

Taybeh - which means delicious in Arabic - is a light colored but full-bodied beer, made according to the German purity law, according to Khoury. He imports malt from Belgium, hops from Bavaria, yeast from England and uses natural spring water from the nearby spring of Ein Samia. The beer's brown bottles come for Portugal and the labels were designed and printed in Ramallah. While the cost of importing the ingredients is high, Khoury is dedicated to producing a natural, quality beer.

"To me, there's an art and a science to producing quality beer," he says. "It's a challenge to educate people about good beer and it's my mission to open Middle East minds to what I'm doing."

Good beer is old news to the Europeans and Americans, but it's taken slightly longer to catch up in these parts. Israel boasts two retail breweries - Maccabi and Goldstar - which also import several European brands. There are also a handful of home brewers and the first brewpub opened its doors in Tel Aviv a few months ago. But beer was actually invented in the Middle East, reminds Khoury. The Egyptian pharoahs knew that beer was good against kidney stones and other illnesses, he says, "so I'm only going back to our origins."

Until last year, most of Taybeh's sales were in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, outside the Palestinian cities and towns in the West Bank, which runs along Israel's Western border, and the Gaza Strip, a large Palestinian area in Israel's south. However, sales were low and profits were nonexistent, given the narrow sales margins during times of political tension when borders between the Palestinian Authority and Israel were closed, blocking import and export deliveries.

Khoury would often set out in his truck to deliver cases and kegs of beer to stores and bars in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, only to be turned away at the border crossing. During those times, it wasn't unusual for an Israeli visitor to end up taking back several cases of beer to liquor stores and bars in Jerusalem, a half-hour ride from Taybeh. At the same time, while Khoury was depending on Israeli - not Palestinian - sales, it was still a fairly small market, as many Israelis wouldn't and won't drink a Palestinian beer for political and ideological reasons.

Food & Beverage Industry

A microbrewery grows in Palestine

Modern Brewery Age, July 19, 1999 by Jessica Steinberg

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