The Past, Present, and Future of Middle Eastern Beer Brewing
By Steve Hindy When I was a Middle East correspondent for the Associated
Press in 1980, I covered an Arab Summit meeting at the InterContinental
Hotel in Amman, Jordan. We journalists gathered what news we could from
the secretive proceedings, cobbled our stories together, and then spent
our evenings around the bar, which was amply provisioned with the
world’s best-known liquors and local and imported beer and wine. The
Arab Summit was followed by an Islamic Summit, which was attended by the
very same leaders. The InterContinental’s bar was shut down in
observance of the Islamic ban on alcoholic beverages. I recall the hotel
manager telling me that the whiskies, gins, vodkas, and other libations
had been transferred to the delegates’ private suites. There was no
drinking in public, but the liquor flowed in private.
Beer
brewing, winemaking, and distilling all have long histories in the
Middle East. In fact, liquor, beer, and wine are still available in most
countries within the region, despite the Islamist revivals that have
swept the area since the early 1980s. Heineken owns breweries in Egypt,
Jordan, and Lebanon—it acquired the Egypt-based, century-old Al Ahram
Beverages Company in 2006 and Lebanon’s Brasserie Almaza in 2002 (a
brewery that has been in operation since 1933)—and its Middle East
division boasts group operating profits of just under $8 million per year. In Lebanon, the main brands are Amstel and Laziza (which means “delicious” in Arabic).
Even
in the countries that have banned alcohol outright (some of the
Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia), non-alcoholic breweries abound. For
example, Carlsberg, the world’s fourth-largest brewer, also owns a
brewery in Saudi Arabia that produces Moussy, a non-alcoholic brew aimed
at upscale and metropolitan consumers.
It has a 38 percent market share of non-alcoholic brews in the nation.
Not to be outdone by its rivals, in 2002 Heineken purchased the Al Ahram
brewing company for control of Fayrouz—its signature malt beverage that claims the unique designation of being the world’s first, and so far only, halal (permissible within Islam) non-alcoholic beer.
It probably won’t be the last. According to an October 2014 report by Euromonitor International
on drinks in Saudi Arabia, there is an “increasing presence of
international brands in the country in clothing, food and drinks.
Low/non alcohol beer, for these reasons, is now highly popular among
Saudi Arabian youth, many of whom associate it with a sense of
adventure, the thrill of being young and a sense of being
free-spirited.”
DRYING OUT
According to Najam Haider, assistant professor of religion at Barnard College, the prohibition of alcoholic beverages
was settled among Islamic jurists in the thirteenth century.
Originally, some jurists had argued that the Koran only banned wine.
Other alcoholic drinks, including beer, they believed, were permitted as
long as the drinker did not become intoxicated. Eventually, though, all
accepted the arguments in favor of prohibition based on the following
verses from the Koran: “You who believe! Do not approach prayer when you are drunk, until you know that which you utter…” Q4:43 “They
question you about strong drink and games of chance. Say: In both is
great sin and some utility for men but the sin is greater than their
usefulness.” Q2:219 “You who believe! Strong drink and
games of chance and idols and divining arrows are only an infamy of
Satan’s handiwork. Leave it aside so that you may succeed.” Q5: 90-1
Another
verse in the Koran promises wine and women when a devout Muslim enters
heaven. The irony of the earthly prohibition and heavenly flow of wine
is not lost in author Kamel Daoud’s novel TheMersault Investigation, which was written as a modern reply to Camus’ The Stranger. In Daoud’s book, the narrator recounts a winemaker complaining that he cannot find workers because wine is considered haram
(illicit) by devout Muslims. “Ha, ha!” says the narrator. “I’ve always
wondered, what’s the reason for this complicated relationship with wine?
Why is it treated as though it’s of the devil, when it’s supposed to be
flowing profusely in Paradise? Why is it forbidden down here, and
promised up there?”
There are still some Sufi sects that dissent
from these views, and of course, anyone who has traveled or lived in the
Middle East knows many devout Muslims consume alcoholic beverages. The
very beginnings of beer, most historians argue, rest in Egypt and
modern-day Iraq. The origins of ales and lagers are rooted in the
region, whether or not the alcohol they contain is permissible.
This point is made clear in a 2011 TEDx talk by Mazen Hajjar, founder of Lebanon’s 961 Beer craft brewery. In “And Then There Was Beer,”
he pleaded with his listeners to understand and appreciate that
alcoholic beverages are an important part of the world culture that is
rooted in the Middle East.
“Human beings like us have been on their earth for a hundred thousand
years,” he said. “For the first 90,000 years we were hunter-gatherers …
living in caves. About 10,000 years ago, something dramatic happened and
all this changed. We moved out of our caves and starting settling in
houses. We grew our own food. Historians like to call this period the
Agricultural Revolution. The Agricultural Revolution started with humans
domesticating barley and up until recently we believed we domesticated
barley because we wanted to make bread. Now we know that is not true. We
domesticated barley to make beer.” His young audience exploded with
applause and laughter.
Hajjar’s armchair anthropology is supported by many serious academics, notably the University of Pennsylvania professor Solomon Katz,
although they often date the first beer to 5,000–7,000 years ago. Some
of the earliest evidence of beer-making has been excavated in the
ancient Sumerian city of Ur, now just south of Baghdad. Many craft
brewers in the United States have recreated this early beer recipe,
using the nineteenth-century poem “The Hymn to Ninkasi,”
the goddess of beer, as their template. The beer is made by baking
barley and then allowing it to ferment in open vessels. Drinkers then
sit around an open pot of beer and drink it through straws that filter
out the barley seeds and chaff.
The Hymn to Ninkasi, inscribed on a nineteenth-century B.C. tablet, contains a recipe for Sumerian beer
Evidence of ancient beer-making has also been uncovered in
Egypt, where pottery fragments have been discovered that were likely to
have been used for brewing.
Ale-style beers were among the oldest beverages ever produced by
humankind, and records of these beverages date back as far as the fifth
millennium B.C. The Elba tablets from ancient Syria demonstrate early insights into the brewing process. Brewers, in those days, were not only women but were priestesses as well, and their brews were used during religious ceremonies. Even in 1400 B.C., Egyptians were warned against letting their tongues slip
in taverns when drinking. One of the outside walls of the Brooklyn
Brewery displays hieroglyphs from ancient Egypt that proclaim, “Beer has
dispelled the illness which was in me,” as translated by Dr. Kent
Weeks, a leading Egyptologist. This may be the earliest beer
advertisement.“The earliest textual reference to beer (the Egyptian word was henket)
dates to the Fifth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, but beer jars, with a
unique shape that is found throughout Egyptian history, have been
uncovered in predynastic and Early Dynastic tombs,” Weeks said. “Small
breweries have been found in predynastic contexts at Hierakonpolis and
Abydos, where large vats still contained residue of fermented cereals.”
By 1897, Egypt’s local beer industry had caught the eye of Belgian brewers,
leading to the creation of the Crown Brewery in Alexandria. The brewery
was eventually nationalized under former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel
Nasser, conglomerating with Pyramid brewery in the 1960s. Brewing in
the ancestral home of beer was on the decline, and there were few
positive signs for its future.
OUR MAN IN CAIRO
My interest in homebrewing
began in 1980, when I met Jim Hastings, a foreign service officer
assigned to the U.S. Agency for International Development at the United
States Embassy in Cairo. Hastings had just completed a three-year stint
in Saudi Arabia, and he and a few other diplomats made beer at home in
the Egyptian capital.
This was before Heineken bought the Stella brand
from Ahmed Zayat, the Egyptian expatriate and owner of American
Pharoah, the horse who won the Triple Crown earlier this year. In the
1980s, the Egyptian Stella was a hit-or-miss beer: bottles were filled
to different levels, a sure sign of quality problems, and some
barkeepers even reported finding matches and nails inside of bottles.
Worse yet, the beer was rumored to be fortified with a dose of formaldehyde to prevent spoilage—a mummified beer in the land of the pyramids.
The
quality of Hastings’ homebrew was several notches above Stella.
Hastings told me that the illicit beer brewed in Saudi Arabia was known
as “sadiki juice,” sadiki meaning “my friend” in
Arabic. I later learned there is a long tradition of homebrewing in
Saudi Arabia: the Saudis banned alcoholic beverages in the early 1950s
when U.S. engineers and oil workers were pouring into the gulf kingdom
to develop its oilfields. Knowing that these expats would be loath to
toil in a parched desert with no access to women or beer, the Arab
American Oil Co., ARAMCO, issued a pamphlet to its employees explaining how to make beer, wine, and spirits at home.
The
title page of the 31-sheet mimeographed pamphlet was designed to hide
the contents of the publication and perhaps make a joke about the
flowery indirection of the Arabic language.
The
title page of a 31-sheet mimeographed pamphlet handed out to Westen
employees of the Arab American Oil Co (ARAMCO), circa 1950.
The introduction to the anonymously authored piece
says: “Those of us who have spent time in Saudi Arabia discovered that
there was a generous quantity and wide variety of alcohol available even
though it was absolutely forbidden to possess, sell, carry, drink or
manufacture. Moreover, we discovered that it was of excellent quality,
nearly hangover proof, and every ounce manufactured in almost any
household kitchen.”
THE MIDDLE EAST’S BEER RENAISSANCE
As of
2015, however, brewing craft beer has left the kitchens of expatriates
and has begun to enter the mainstream. Israel and other Middle Eastern
nations have seen insurgent microbreweries taking on larger, dominant
brewers. There are now more than 20 U.S.-style craft breweries in Israel, one in Jordan, four in Lebanon, and one in Palestine’s West Bank. Although alcoholic beverages are strictly forbidden in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran, homebrewing is common in all three.
Hajjar,
a former journalist who also worked in the airline industry, started
961 Beer in 2006, named for the telephone country code of Lebanon, the
most diverse and liberal nation in the Middle East. When the Israelis
were bombing Lebanon and Hezbollah was launching rockets into Israel,
Hajjar started selling pale ales, porters, and wheat beers to a populace
that believed beer could only be like Amstel or Laziza, both light
lager beers made in what might be called the international style.
“I
started 961 because I got tired of drinking fizzy light lager beers,”
said Hajjar. “But people in Lebanon could not understand how a red ale
or a dark porter could be beer, or why there was sediment in the bottom
of my wheat beer. People thought there was something illicit about what
we were doing. Our biggest challenge was educating beer drinkers. There
was no beer culture, and worse, we had Heineken fighting us with their
endless resources.”
Hajjar was determined to establish 961 in
Lebanon, and eventually he exported his beer to more than 25 countries.
He said the Muslim fundamentalism sweeping the Middle East was not an
issue in Lebanon. He compared the Islamic prohibition of alcohol to the
Protestant Christian fundamentalism that championed prohibition in
America in the 1920s. “Prohibition has failed in the Middle East the
same way it failed in America,” he said.
Now married with a young child, Hajjar has moved to Melbourne, Australia, and started Hawkers Beer, named for the Lebanese immigrants who have spread around the globe hawking consumer goods in the streets.
“I
felt I accomplished what I set out to do in Lebanon,” he said. “961 is
established and now there are three more craft breweries starting up.
Craft beer is booming in Australia, and I love Melbourne."
Hajjar
has counterparts in the rest of the region. In Jordan, Yazan Karadsheh
started his Carakale Brewery in 2009 after spending his college years at
the University of Colorado in Boulder, one of the focal points of
America’s craft beer revolution. He worked for Halliburton in the oil
fields of Wyoming before taking a job at a homebrew supply store in
Boulder. He eventually graduated from the master brewing program
at the University of California at Davis and worked at Boulder’s
Upslope Brewing Co. before returning home to start Carakale, named for
an endangered species of desert lynx.
Karadsheh is a member of
Jordan’s minority Christian community. He had trouble finding a location
for his brewery because some conservative Jordanian property owners did
not want to rent to a brewer. He found a site on a winding road near
the Christian village of Fuhais overlooking an olive grove. He
encountered the same obstacle as Hajjar and craft brewers the world
over: Most beer drinkers think of beer as only the light lager style
championed by the brewing world’s giants: Anheuser-Busch InBev, South
African Breweries-Miller, Heineken, and Carlsberg. They have to be
educated to appreciate the rich flavors of the craft beer world—pale
ales, hoppy IPAs, porters, stouts, dark lagers, bocks, and Belgian-style
singel, dubbel, and tripel ales.
Palestinian
beer maker Nadim Khoury holds an empty bottle of non-alcoholic beer in
his brewery in the West Bank village of Taiybeh, near Ramallah, March 1,
2006.
The granddaddy of the Middle Eastern craft brewers is Taybeh Brewery, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River. (Taybeh
is another word for “delicious” in Arabic.) Taybeh is the West Bank’s
only exclusively Christian town. The brewery was founded by Canaan David
Khoury in 1994 and now is run by his son, brewmaster Nadim Khoury, a
graduate of the University of California-Davis, and his brother David
Khoury. The Khourys returned to Taybeh after the Oslo Accords between
Israel and Palestine were signed in 1993. Their brewery stands as one of
the more durable legacies of the Oslo Accords. Palestinians don’t have
their own state, but they do have their own beer.Taybeh offers
tours to the public and runs a very successful summer festival and
Oktoberfest. The Oktoberfest was cancelled in 2014 in recognition of the
tragedy of the 50-day Israel-Hamas War in the Gaza Strip, but the
popular festival is returning in 2015.
Israel got its first craft
brewery and pub in 2009 when former Brooklyn resident David Cohen
decided to immigrate to the Jewish state and open a brewery. The Dancing
Camel brewery in Tel Aviv was inspired by the American craft beer
movement. Cohen was a homebrewer and a member of the New York City
Homebrewers Guild, a club that was cofounded by Brooklyn Brewery
brewmaster Garrett Oliver.
The story of the Dancing Camel is based on a short story, “The Dancing Camels,”
by Dov Silverman. In the story, a rabbi who is a singer, musician,
songwriter, and poet leaves his home in Damascus and walks toward
Galilee. He is captured by Bedouin highwaymen, who plan to rob him. The
rabbi begins to play his flute and the raiders’ camels begin to dance to
the music. The animals huddle around the rabbi, protecting him from the
thieves, who eventually flee.
The new generation of craft brewers
in the Middle East were all inspired by the North American craft beer
revolution—craft beer has captured 11 percent of the U.S. beer market
and is growing apace—but the trend can hardly be characterized as
American cultural imperialism, because beer brewing is so deeply rooted
in the culture of the Middle East.
Around the world, the craft
beer revolution is marked by collaboration. In the United States, more
than 3,700 breweries compete with each other for sales and shelf space
in their various markets, but they also come together through their
trade association, the Brewers Association, to work for the common good.
The entrepreneurs who started these companies meet every year at the
Great American Beer Festival and the Craft Brewers Conference and
exchange ideas and beers. Indeed, beer has a way of bringing people
together. It would be fitting if this spirit could one day bring
together the craft brewers of the Middle East, the place where beer was
born.
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