Towards a brighter, maltier future 

Welcome to ‘Behind the Bottle’, where we look into the various projects and assorted happenings that we get up to at M&H. This week we’re discussing Kibbutz Be’eri, and our small part in rebuilding their shattered community. 

Thousands of them. Tiny flecks of life erupting from a field that mere weeks before was a dustbowl crisscrossed with tank treads like a nightmarish Zen garden. These little gasps of green are barley shoots. The next generation of Israeli malt-to-be, born from the very soil of Israel’s greatest tragedy.

October 7th 2023 was arguably the darkest day in Israeli history. A surprise massacre and mass kidnapping that has choked the joy from our nation every day since. Hardest hit were of course communities like Be’eri, directly attacked, sacked, and ravaged by terrorists for a full, horrific day.

Kibbutz Be’eri notably suffered greatly, with almost a tenth of their quiet commune either murdered or dragged to captivity. 

The continued war after Oct 7th saw Be’eri as a staging post for counter-attacks into Gaza proper. The traffic of tank brigades turned the once bountiful Be’eri farmland into literal powder, so crushed was the soil under tank treads. Amid this stark reminder of what was lost, the resilient spirit of the Be’eri community was determined to carve out a hopeful future; and that’s where we came in. 

Despite being a quiet rural agricultural slice of socialist utopia, sleepy little Be’eri had a whisky club! Upon discovering this unlikely quirk of the kibbutz, M&H invited Be’eri to the distillery for a night full of barbecue and liquid therapy. It was a lifechanging experience for both parties. Some of our guests had not seen one another since they were evacuated, and many more were unable to speak of the horrors they endured until our whisky loosened lips. For us, we were brought to our knees by the humility and strength of the Be’eri survivors, and committed ourselves to helping rebuild their community in any way we could. 

Eventually Haim Jelin, a heroic local leader, and Avida Bachar, the head of Be’eri’s agriculture who tragically lost a leg on Oct 7th, came to us with a plea and a plan: “The soil drank so much blood, everything was burned, let’s make some whisky”….how could we possibly say no?

As titanic tractors ploughed the soil anew, and we were ready with 100 tons of local barley seed. 100 tons of Israeli barley planted in an Israeli field at the site of Israel’s greatest tragedy. The poetry writes itself. A project lush with local pride and a message of (literal) regrowth, those blood-stained fields will produce the means by which we can bring joy and consolation to so many. With a harvest expected later in 2025, Be’eri is on the parth to being the cradle of Israeli barley production, and thus the quite literal bedrock of the Israeli whisky industry.

To say that we’re proud of this project is a deep understatement. 2024 saw the residents of Be’eri become part of our distillery family, often popping in for a visit when they’re in Tel Aviv. With this project they are no longer just sentimentally attached to us, but are now an integral and inexorable part of the M&H distillery. Thanks to the efforts of Haim and Avida, as well as our own Tomer Goren and Tal Chotiner, we may together look forward to a brighter, maltier future. 

L’chaim. ‘To life’, literally.