ABU DHABI: In 2018, Chad McGehee opened Side Hustle Brews and Souls, a beer and factory with the Abu Dhabi logo and cool animals on its bottles.
The only issue was that it was forbidden to make beer there. So his business imported hoppy India white ale from the United States into the UAE for sale.
As part of a wider reassessment of drinking laws in the Muslim society that is extremely drawing visitors, Abu Dhabi has changed its laws to allow for the micro and create breweries that have taken over the rest of the world. And McGehee’s desire of opening IPAs in Arabia became a real, despite the fact that they were the first to do so.
” The government had created a rules around digestion, but the actions of getting a force, the actions of observation, all of these things were never put on paper yet. As we were going through this process, McGehee said in a new interview at his brewpub on Abu Dhabi’s Al Maryah Island that that had to be built out.
People in the UAE have long argued that Abu Dhabi is more clogged-up than Dubai, which has raucous surrounding emirates and bars that draw tourists and locals for drinks. Like neighboring Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait, Sharjah openly forbids the purchase and consumption of alcohol in the seven UAE-member countries.
But beginning in 2020, Abu Dhabi changed its laws. In order to increase sales and tourism during the coronavirus crisis, it eliminated its registration system for drinking to purchase beer. Eliminating the certificates allowed Muslims, if they chose, to consume, as well as decriminalized beer ownership for those without a permit.
” I think growth in this region is par for the course, they’re usually moving things forwards”, said Nadeem Selbak, one of the lovers at Craft, which is Side Hustle’s brew pub.
The Emirates also has a rigid no-tolerance plan for drunken driving and driving in public. Islam even considers alcohol intake as “haram”, or forbidden.
However, alcohol sales have long been a significant source of revenue income and a lucrative source of income for the UAE. Dubai Duty Free, for example, sold 6 million bottles of liquor last month, as well as 3.8 million containers of wine and 2.3 million containers of whiskey for hungry travelers.
However, despite that demand, the UAE did not have the infrastructure to build a beer. Nearly all McGehee ended up importing came from the United States, about entirely.
Abu Dhabi is a market for Side Hustle that is undeveloped.
” The concept for me was like going back in time, when I started about 20 times ago”, said Mitchell Dougherty, Side Hustle’s brewmaster.
At any given point, Craft has 14 beverages on touch. They have brewed 34 so far this year, and they hope to had reached that number by the end of the year. Some of the names of the beers are winking references to life in the UAE, such as one referred to as” Massage Card Ninja,” a nod to business cards that show scantily clad women appearing under some Dubai neighborhoods ‘ windshield wipers.
According to McGehee, the various beverages come from countries as diverse as the palates of their global customers, including those from the Czech Republic, the UK, Japan, and the U.S.
” If you look at Abu Dhabi, you have people from about 200 locations”, he said. We’re making an effort to accommodate as many of them as possible by ensuring that they all have their own definitions of what liquor is, build liquor is, brew is, and IPA is.
