A microbrewery grows in Palestine - Imported Beer Update - Nadim Khoury's microbrewery in the Middle East

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.

"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.

Ironically, while Khoury's brew has always been somewhat political, particularly given its label which states that the beer is brewed in Palestine, a state that doesn't yet exist according to Israel. Yet the beer is certified as kosher. Its certification comes from a rabbi in Ofra, a Jewish settlement nearby, who verified that the beer's all natural ingredients were kosher.

It's an odd partnership, considering that on the political front, the Palestinian and Israeli governments are constantly opposing Jewish settlements in Arab areas. But Khoury also distributes Taybeh beer through Tekoa Agriculture Technology Ltd., another Jewish settlement that grows and markets mushrooms. The Tekoa connection allows him to sell the beer to Jewish hotels in West Jerusalem, a market that would be otherwise unavailable.

At present, about 70 percent of Khoury's sales are to Palestinian establishments in the West Bank, and to heavily populated Arab areas, such as Nazareth and Haifa up north, while the remaining 30 percent are Jewish-Israeli establishments and wholesalers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

In addition, after being written up by a local correspondent in the German magazine Der Spiegel, several German beer producers contacted Khoury and he licensed it for sale in Germany and is exporting it to next-door neighbor Jordan as well.

"It's a beer that doesn't scare people away," said Khoury in his office overlooking the stark, cool brewery. "People have been brainwashed and mouthwashed into drinking inferior beers. They're drinking mouthfuls of preservatives."

Including the region's rainy winter season and the month-long Ramadan fast, during which the region's observant Moslems don't partake of any alcohol, the brewery sells about 20 liters a week. All told, the emphasis is still on micro rather than macro, as Khoury only sold 50,000 cases in 1998 at $24 a case, and he has yet to make a profit.

With three years of brewing under his belt, Khoury recently developed several new products, including a family-size bottle and two new beers, one light and one dark, which will be launched this summer. He first created a quality ale that he felt could compete with the heavier lagers. Now he's using a slightly different recipe for the dark beer, making it a bit hoppier, but keeping it nice and malty.

"I had to get to know the taste of the people before I could get into the serious beers," he said.

Jessica Steinberg is a freelance writer based in the Middle East. This is her first story about beer.

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