Taybeh
"The beer is cold and Palestinian and it tastes like someone decided not to give up. Which is the whole point."
I came to Taybeh expecting to like the beer and I left loving the village, which is either a good travel lesson or just what always happens when you arrive somewhere with narrow expectations. Taybeh sits on a hilltop in the Ramallah governorate, about fifteen kilometres northeast of the city, and on a clear day you can see the Mediterranean from the church courtyard — a silver strip on the western horizon, impossibly close to a place that feels so removed from everything coastal. The village is entirely Christian, one of a handful in the West Bank, and it carries that distinction lightly: the churches are well-maintained and the crosses are on the walls but the coffee shops and the family homes look identical to those in any other Palestinian village.
The brewery is not hidden. You follow signs from the main road through the village until you reach a compound that was clearly built with conviction, given the improbability of the project. Nadim Khoury founded Taybeh Brewing Company in 1994, shortly after the Oslo Accords created a brief political moment when a Palestinian microbrewery might have seemed not entirely quixotic. The beer — named Taybeh, which means “delicious” in Arabic, derived from the village name — is brewed in several varieties and sold throughout the West Bank and exported to Europe in quantities that would have seemed impossible when production started. I drank a cold dark Taybeh in the brewery’s small tasting room with a view over the olive groves and thought that the taste of it, which is good but not remarkable by international standards, was almost beside the point. The point was that it existed at all.
The Khoury family, who have been in the village for generations, gave me an informal tour of the production facility. The equipment was imported from Germany. The hops and malt come from overseas. The water is local, drawn from the same aquifer that has been supplying the village since antiquity. The annual Oktoberfest they hold in the village — the only one in the Middle East, as the signage notes with justifiable pride — draws Palestinian families from across the West Bank and diaspora visitors who come specifically for it. There is something both comic and genuinely moving about a Palestinian Oktoberfest in a hilltop Christian village, and I mean both of those things simultaneously.
The old Byzantine church ruins at the edge of the village are worth an hour of careful looking. The remains of a fifth-century church survive in partial walls and extensive mosaic floors, some sections exposed and some still under protective covering. The mosaics use the geometric patterns common to Byzantine ecclesiastical work throughout the Levant — interlocking circles, vine scrolls, stylised birds — and several are in remarkable condition, the colours still reading across fifteen centuries of West Bank weather. A local custodian with a key will let you in and then leave you alone, which is the ideal arrangement for looking at mosaic floors.
The village makes its own olive oil from the groves that cover the hillside below the houses, and the oil is sold in the village and through the brewery shop. I bought a bottle and drank it with bread from a bakery on the main street, standing in the street in the afternoon sunshine in a village that has been doing something like this — pressing oil, baking bread, building things, rebuilding them — for longer than most of the places I have considered ancient. The simplicity of that continuity is not a comfort exactly. But it is something.
When to go: The annual Oktoberfest in September is the obvious occasion — but the village is worth visiting any time between March and November. The olive harvest in October is when the groves below the village are at their most active and the oil is at its freshest. The brewery tasting room is open most days; call ahead to confirm hours, as they vary by season.