Walking through a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Colorado in the US, Jordanian-born Yazan Karadsheh had no idea one of the books in there would change his life forever.
Yazan describes being in the “right place at the right time” when a book fell from a shelf and landed right in front of him soon after he graduated from the University of Colorado in 2006.
The World Atlas of Beer would start Yazan on his journey to open Jordan’s first microbrewery.
Yazan flipped through the pages and saw a map that showed where in the world each beer was brewed. He says he was surprised to see one of the most popular beers in Jordan, Amstel, was imported from The Netherlands.
“That’s when a light bulb clicked on, like, we don’t have a Jordanian beer,” he says.
In 2009, Yazan, armed with a mechanical engineering degree from Colorado University and a qualification in brewing science, set out to change that.
Carakale Brewing Company, which overlooks Jordan’s Blue Valley, opened in 2013 and has been growing ever since.
In the first year, the company sold 5,000 litres over the entire year. It hit a quarter of a million last year and he says it's on track to surpass that figure in 2018.
Yazan, who sells his product locally and internationally including Europe and other parts of the Middle East, says his mission statement is to create a beer culture like the one in Australia in Jordan.
Yazan says his focus is to revolutionise the way people taste beer in his homeland. Source: Carakale Brewing Company
“How people [in Jordan] perceived beer before we started was as this yellow, ultrafiltered, super carbonated drink," he tells SBS Food in Jordan.
While Carakale is growing from strength to strength, and will host Jordan's first ever beer festival in 2018, he says initially the brewery faced public backlash.
We’re a persistent, perseverant group of people. I’m very proud of what we’ve created here.
The majority of Jordan's population is Muslim and Islam generally forbids consuming alcohol, but Yazan says some people's stance against it is tied just as much to tradition as it is religion.
“That resistance only made us stronger and more, it just made us recognise who we are,” Yazan says.
Today, he says, opposition has largely eased.
“We’re a persistent, perseverant group of people. I’m very proud of what we’ve created here and the group, the team that we have, is amazing.”
Yazan says he feels a sense of pride in creating smething that doesn't involve “pushing buttons and having one set recipe”. Source: Carakale Brewing Company
What's the appeal of craft beer?
Yazan says he feels a sense of pride in making something that doesn't involve “pushing buttons and "one set recipe”.
Inside his tasting room, which on the weekend sometimes accommodates as many as one hundred people, a chalkboard showcases six varieties of beer on tap and others that are bottled.
He says his most recent concoction is his most sentimental.
RECIPES FEATURING BEER
Beer-infused mustard
The Black Camel Spider is a 10.5 per cent imperial porter, brewed with Bedouin coffee and dates, and the name is inspired by Yazan’s early days of business.
“When I started this brewery, I was basically living here in the floor above us for the first couple of years and we’re kind of out in the wilderness,” he says.
“Camel spiders are basically a spider the size of your palm, run thirty miles an hour, [have] two sets of fangs.
There were two of them in the brewery.
“So this is the Black Camel Spider series, this is based off of those two spiders that sadly I killed, but it was either me or them.”
Yazan now has plans for Carakale to collaborate with breweries from across the Middle East.
But in the meantime, Yazan says his focus is to revolutionise the way people taste beer in his homeland.
