Palestinian Oktoberfest Offers the West Bank in a Beer Glass
Taybeh, a Christian village in the West Bank, celebrated its 11th Oktoberfest on the September 24 and 25. The event, which draws thousands of Palestinians and foreigners every year, is a unique occurrence in the Palestinian Territories, where most Muslims eschew alcohol. Here’s a primer on the West Bank beer festival:
The festival is sponsored by the Taybeh Brewing Company, which was started in 1994 by Palestinian businessman Nadim Khoury as a way to build the Palestinian economy in the optimistic period after the Oslo Accords.
Taybeh’s beers, which come in six styles, are sipped in bars in the West Bank, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. Several bars in Israel — most with a left-leaning Jewish and Arab clientele — also serve Taybeh.
The festival was originally held in the village center, but in recent years village officials have deemed the event too raucous to be held in the public square. This year Oktoberfest was held in the pavilion near the Khoury family home and factory.
The 2016 festival included vendors who sold locally-made honey, puppets and Palestinian embroidery. There was also chicken and beef shawarma, falafel and Beit Jala-made pork sausages, another West Bank rarity. There were also jugglers, dancers and hip hop artists, and a miniature climbing wall.
Taybeh buys malt from Belgium and bottles from Portugal. Because Israel controls the West Bank borders, the products can face delays depending on the political situation. Canaan Khoury, the son of Nadim Khoury and the company’s engineer, began a winery with the mission of creating a completely locally-sourced product in order to sidestep Israeli restrictions. He named the wine line Nadim, after his father.
Both Canaan and Nadim Khoury studied brewing at the University of California, Davis with legendary brewmaster Michael Lewis.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at [email protected] or on Twitter @naomizeveloff
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO