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 license, 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 license as Carakale Brewing Co., 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 monopolized by Heineken NV’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 percent 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 in college in Boulder, Colo. “It takes time to wake up and open up their palates.”
For his first beer, he created a blond ale as a sort of a gateway beer. The brewery sold its first bottle in late 2013 and is now available in most of the approximately 600 stores, bars, restaurants, and hotels that sell alcohol in Jordan.
Now, a decade since Karadsheh became obsessed with creating a native brew, Carakale will finally make its debut in bars in the United States—in Arizona last weekend and in New York, where Karadesh and his newlywed wife live part-time, in early November. “Our second mission statement is to have us recognized in the world as a Jordanian craft brewery, which is unheard of,” Karadsheh says.
A Market Saturated in Beer
Karadsheh’s biggest obstacle in America is how many craft beers that have launched as part of the recent boom—the number of brewers has doubled in the past four years, to more than 5,200 total. A lot of beer geeks are more interested in the next New England IPA than another exotic import.