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The Philadelphia Inquirer · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · 4 November 2001

CP-2001-007

Sales of first Palestinian beer go flat

This Mideast brew of hope was popular before the renewed violence.

Michael Matza, Inquirer Staff Writer, Taybeh

Sales of first Palestinian beer go flat — The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 November 2001
The Philadelphia Inquirer · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · 4 November 2001

Transcribed from the clipping

“TAYBEH, West Bank — They said Nadim Khoury was crazy, back in 1994, when he staked his future on a microbrewery in an Arab land where devout Muslims don’t drink and alcohol advertising is prohibited. Clearly off his rocker, they said, amid suicide bombers and restricted borders, when he sank $1.5 million into a West Bank plant whose success hinged on the prospect of peace in the Middle East. But Khoury, 41, general director of the Taybeh Brewing Co., made history with the first Palestinian beer. His was a business built on hope, and when peace seemed more than a mirage, business was good. But a year of violence has soured both hope and prosperity here… And as thousands of expatriate Palestinians began streaming back to help with the birth to a nation, Khoury was a bright example that not every Palestinian was a penniless refugee living a desultory, angry life. ‘We got our approval from the Israeli [Civil Administration] before they pulled out. Yasir Arafat gave us his blessing. When we had peace, we had lots of business,’ Khoury recalled last week inside his dank, 10,000-square-foot brew house, amid the gurgle of gleaming stainless-steel tanks and a picture of himself with Palestinian leader Arafat. Taybeh is a preservative-free brew of Belgian malt and Bavarian hops mixed with local springwater. Khoury named it for his village of 1,200 Christian Arabs in the ancient, terraced Samaritan hills between Ramallah and Jericho, and the handcrafted ale grew to such success that even upscale shops and bars in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were starting to stock it. Taybeh, which in Arabic means nice and delicious, was consumed in the secular cafes of Ramallah and sold under the counter in some shops during Ramadan, the Muslim holiday month. It was a staple on the menu at the legendary American Colony Hotel in Arab East Jerusalem, a frequently requested choice at the casino in Palestinian-controlled Jericho, and an off-hours favorite of the Marines assigned to guard the U.S. Consulate. (The refrigerator in the soldiers’ house wears a jaunty Taybeh bumper sticker. ‘If you’ve had it — smile,’ reads the sticker, replete with grinning happy face.) A small but growing number of peace-camp Israelis smiled on Taybeh. A West Bank rabbi even pronounced it kosher. Now, more than a year of intifadah violence has drained its success to the dregs. ‘Business isn’t bad, it’s terrible. And it’s getting worse every day,’ Khoury said. ‘Making business in this country is like a nightmare.’ From a once-high capacity of 5,000 barrels a year, the brewery is down to 1,000… Where Khoury once supplied 63 hotels in Jerusalem, he now supplies only three… To keep one of his Tel Aviv restaurant clients happy, Khoury said he’s had to mask the Taybeh label by wrapping layers of white tape around the kegs. The restaurant sells Taybeh on tap but identifies it only as the ‘house brand’ to avoid angering Israelis who don’t want to drink a Palestinian beer. ‘It hurts me to do it, because I’m really proud of my beer,’ said Khoury. ‘But what am I supposed to do?’ Khoury attended Hellenic College in the Boston area, where he worked in a liquor store and dabbled in homemade brews during the beer boom of the ’80s and ’90s. From Massachusetts he headed to the University of California at Davis, where he got a brew-master’s degree… Yet Khoury remains optimistic… ‘If peace doesn’t take place in this region, the whole world will be on fire. We haven’t seen peace yet,’ he said. ‘But we have seen pieces of peace. We just have to be patient and keep on hoping.’”

Context added by this archive

A man taping over his own label so that the people drinking it will not know who made it. Photo credit: Evelyn Hockstein / For The Inquirer.

Cite this item

"Sales of first Palestinian beer go flat," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 November 2001. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2001-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2001-007

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2001-007.

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