Meet the Only Female Brewer in Palestine

 

Nisaa FM: - “When I tell people that I make the beer, whether they are Arabs or foreigners, they say to me: you’re joking, right?” As the only female brewer in Palestine, and possibly the Middle East, Madees Khoury is challenging stereotypes about what women can and can’t do.

 

The General Manager at Taybeh Brewing Company…. is a woman

Madees Khoury is the general manager at the Taybeh Brewing Company. She is used to people’s surprise. She is, after all, believed to be the only female beer brewer in the Middle East. Beer making is a family tradition for the Khourys, a Christian Palestinian family. The 31-year-old has been brewing for 10 years, and has taken over the running of the company from her father and uncle. She has big plans for the future, exporting Taybeh beer internationally.

Madees is in charge of most of the day-to-day operations at the brewery, including organising Taybeh’s annual Oktoberfest beer festival.

Sometimes male clients will refuse to speak to her and demand to talk to her father instead. “Arabs are very conservative, especially the men and especially the older men,” says Madees. Her strategy is to barrel through their opposition with hard work and knowledge of her craft.

 

 

The history of the Taybeh beer

Nadim and David Khoury left Taybeh after the 1967 war and started new lives in the US. But they returned home in the days that followed the 1993 Oslo agreements, hoping a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians was just around the corner.

As the diplomats tried to hammer out a final agreement, the Khoury brothers were busy opening the doors of the first microbrewery in the Middle East. “People thought: 'How crazy is this family to open a microbrewery in Palestine, in the Middle East? They are doomed to fail,’” tells Madees.

In the end the peace talks failed, but the beer business flourished. It has grown through wars and intifadas and is increasingly exporting to other countries.

However, Madees says that making beer in Palestine, and being a woman in the business has not been entirely without problems. Stepping into the male-dominated world of beer making has its challenges, many of them multiplied by the patriarchal culture of Palestinian society. Skeptical men seem to be the least of her problems. “Society, religion, occupation,” she laughs as she counts the challenges out. “Everything is in the way of making beer.”

 

The challenges of beer brewing in Palestine

Palestinian society is more than 90 per cent Muslim, which drastically limits the market for alcohol. Taybeh has half of its sales in the West Bank but with focus on cities like Ramallah or Bethlehem where there are Christians who drink and thirsty foreigners who visit.

Furthermore, like many Palestinian villages Taybeh struggles with its water supply. While Israeli settlements usually have water at all times, places like Taybeh get water once every 10 days and have to store it into tanks until the next supply. The stop-start water flow can disrupt the beer-making process.

Also delivery can be troubled. Madees tells a story about her father trying to make his delivery during the Second Intifada. Israeli forces set up a checkpoint in the road and refused him to pass. So he found a donkey and strapped the beer cases to it and sent the animal wandering past the checkpoint on its own.

“Palestinians can overcome any kind of difficult situation,” she says. “If there’s a checkpoint, we find another route. If there’s a there’s not water supply, we’ll store it in a beer tank. If we face challenges, we find a way to overcome it.”

The Taybeh company could be seen as an example of Palestinian business success. However, according to Madees the Palestinian Authority (PA) is wary of the beer brewery. Its food safety inspectors sometimes refuse to enter the brewery because they don't want to be associated with alcohol. “You would think the PA would champion a business like this but they don’t,” Madees says. “We’re not going to force anyone to drink it.”

 

News Deeply has made a video with Madees Khoury, where she tells about her job. Find the video right. 

 

Source: www.newsdeeply.com