Beer buoyed by Dead Sea salt takes craft world by storm

When you’re trying to open a brewery in a predominantly Muslim country, you do a lot of things yourself. At least that’s what Yazan Karadsheh, the founder of the first craft brewery in Jordan, learned.

When he started the venture, in 2010, there was no government application for a brewery licence, much less a vocabulary for such terms as “craft brewery”, “hoppiness”, or “malt”.

After two years of red tape, a lawyer friend of Karadsheh’s father helped him secure a licence as Carakale Brewing Company, a riff on the caracal, a regional mountain cat species.

He then convinced local officials to approve a manufacturing plant. After that, he persuaded local bar owners to let him break into a market monopolised by Heineken’s Amstel Brewery.

Even though beer is believed to have originated in the Middle East thousands of years ago, most Muslims believe alcohol is forbidden under Islam.

Today, there are only a handful of craft breweries, mostly in Lebanon, Israel, and the West Bank. Jordan is more than 90 per cent Muslim.

“My first goal was to create a craft beer culture in Jordan, which doesn’t happen overnight,” says Karadsheh, 33, a Christian and self-described “unicorn”, who got his taste for craft beer at university in Colorado, in the United States.

“It takes time to wake up and open up their palates.”