Thirty feet away a dry and wavy hill of beige grass crackled and suddenly erupted into flame. There was a pit stop on the edge of village. We finally got back in the cab and started heading back toward Ramallah, and this return trip would prove to take even longer than the first.
“Drink the Revolution,” it reads, though its unclear against whom or what or which people this revolution is directed. Word of mouth is the way of business here. An old Jordanian law, which for some reason still holds influence in the territories, says that one cannot openly advertise for alcoholic beverages. And in Ramallah and the surrounding towns, there’s a different set of issues. Even so, she was able to rattle off a long list of bars and pubs in the Holy City that serve this Palestinian brew. And to go the couple dozen kilometers into Israel proper is day-long endeavor for these people. It’s basically an impossibility, she said, to get a box of anything with “MADE IN PALESTINE” stamped on its side into America. Despite the fact that the family who started the brewery is just a bunch of ex-pats, the U.S. Taybeh is sold in the territories, in Israel, in France and Germany and they’re working on Asia. After the video, the woman walked us around to the various tanks and machines and we sampled some of the goods. Amid the colorful stacked boxes of lagers and ales, the young woman who’d opened the door, sat us down to watch a quick video about how Taybeh was founded. The face became a body, and a body with keys no less, and soon enough we were inside the Taybeh Brewery for a private tour. “Are you looking for the brewery?” the face said in perfect English. Suddenly, a voice from a face on a balcony. I walked around looking for a soul or an entrance or something. Or, we found a building with a big painting of a beer bottle on it. We would agree on a price later, the driver seemed to agree to then. Who would have guessed? Anyway, the meter in that thing was steadily churning and bubbling up, but we thought somehow that it didn’t matter. We didn’t know this yet, but a service taxi is something different than a taxi taxi. Take the taxi to the brewery for about 8 NIS. Find a service taxi near the center of the city. Back in Jerusalem, I called the brewery to ask the best way to get from there to Taybeh. We were heading uphill and away from Ramallah in a taxi. “But she knew we were coming, right?” we thought with a big dose of dread. The Lonely Planet-listed 15 kilometers had already turned to 20 and the time from 3:30 to just beyond 4. Every 50 meters the road had a speed hump or was torn up.
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