Palestinian Beer: Shepherds from the Birzeit Brewery
The young brewery drew a shepherd with a crook on its label - in the countryside around Bethlehem you'd struggle to find a more fitting image. The Palestinian Authority turned the design down, though: the figure supposedly looked too much like Jesus, and Jesus has no business on a beer bottle. It took the brewery three months to convince the authorities that a shepherd is simply a shepherd.
Shepherds is a Pilsner-style pale lager from a microbrewery in the town of Birzeit - one of the few beers brewed in Palestine itself.
The Beer of the Shepherds
The English name means shepherds and the Arabic جعة الرعاة says the same thing: the beer of the shepherds. The name recalls figures the whole world knows from the Christmas story - the shepherds in the fields around Bethlehem were the first to learn that the child had been born. Both the name and the label draw on the Christian memory of the region where the brewery stands: Birzeit is a Christian town near Ramallah, and Palestinian brewing is entirely in the hands of the Christian minority, because the Muslim majority abstains from alcohol on religious grounds.
The Second Brewery in a Country Where Beer Isn't the Norm
Birzeit Brewery was founded in 2013 by the three Sayej brothers; they didn't sell their first bottle until the summer of 2015, because permits and importing equipment take longer in the West Bank than anywhere else. They weren't the first: two decades earlier, the Taybeh brewery started up in another Christian village, the very first microbrewery in the Middle East - it beat the first Israeli one by roughly ten years, and Yasser Arafat backed it at the time. The regional family is rounded out by Lebanon's Almaza and Jordan's Petra, which despite the name is brewed in Amman; and just across the border there's Israeli Goldstar.
Brewing beer in the West Bank is a logistical feat in itself: ingredients from Europe reach Israeli ports in two weeks, but then spend months more on their way to Palestinian breweries, and the finished bottles wait at checkpoints, where soldiers sometimes open even the kegs - a delivery run to Jerusalem, twenty minutes by road, can stretch into hours. Just how fragile the business is became clear during the Second Intifada: it cut Taybeh's sales by ninety percent and the brewery kept its head above water by selling olive oil. Even so, Shepherds sells in Israel too and is exported to Italy, Chile and the USA - past every barrier and all the way overseas.
Alongside the flagship pale beer there's an amber ale and a dark stout. The Pilsner base means that a Czech feels at home with the very first glass; just don't expect beer on every corner - in Palestine you'll mainly find alcohol served in Christian towns and in places that cater to tourists. And anyone who wants to see Palestinian beer in full swing can head to Taybeh for its Oktoberfest: it has been held since 2005, and the beer there comes with dabke dancing.
A Bottle with Water in Bethlehem
I drank Shepherds in the tourist part of Bethlehem, where a chilled bottle came bundled with half a liter of water, 15 ILS (4 EUR) for the pair. It tasted exactly the way a pale lager should: clean, with a gentle hop bitterness and no exotic surprises - to a Czech palate, almost like home. And then the beer surprised me once more: I later spotted the same bottle in an Israeli shop. Checkpoints hold up kegs, not thirst.
