Beer came to the Middle East thousands of years ago from ancient Iraq and Egypt, but the east bank of the Jordan had no brewing of its own until the 1950s. Transjordan was an emirate under the British Mandate from 1921 and became the Hashemite Kingdom on 25 May 1946. Alcohol is legal for adults over 18 and is sold in licensed shops, bars, hotels and restaurants, yet the country is about 97 per cent Muslim and drinking still carries a stigma. According to Vice and the University of Colorado, only the Christian minority, roughly 3 per cent of the people, can start an alcohol business or brew beer.
The first brewery was the General Investment Company, founded in 1955 in partnership with the Dutch Amstel brewery as the Jordan Brewery Co. Ltd., with a capital of JOD 100,000. In 1958 it built the first Amstel brewery outside the Netherlands, at Zarqa, and in 1964 it launched Petra, the oldest local brand, known for its strength: 8 per cent for the regular beer and 10 for Petra Premium. Heineken took over Amstel in 1968 and now holds about 10.7 per cent of the Jordanian company, whose largest shareholder is the Abu Jaber family with 36 per cent (Mubasher). In 1987 the firm became a public company under its present name, and it trades on the Amman Stock Exchange as GENI. The plant stands in the Awajan district of Zarqa and the head office in Amman; in 2023 the plant had 68 workers and the office 63. The 2023 range lists Amstel, Petra, Henninger and Falcon beers, with imported Heineken, Sol and spirits.
Amstel is still the most drunk beer in Jordan, with Petra second. A lager called Philadelphia, after the ancient name of Amman, was on sale by January 2014. Beer is heavily taxed: the excise was above 11 US dollars a gallon in November 2013 and about 20 by 2014 (Vice). In October 2018 an MP, Ahmad al-Raqab, asked the government to ban alcohol and its production; the trade stayed legal. On 6 May 2026 Jordan Customs began charging the special tax and duties on alcohol on a scale tied to the alcohol content, in the Aqaba economic zone too.
Craft brewing began with Carakale in Fuheis, a mostly Christian town west of Amman. Its founder Yazan Karadsheh, an electrical engineer from the University of Colorado Boulder (2006), learnt to brew in Colorado and at the UC Davis Master Brewers programme. Back in Jordan in 2009 he brewed 2.5 barrels in his parents' garden and got a licence after about a year and a half, through a family friend. The 50-barrel brewery, which cost about 3 million dollars and took nearly three years to build, put its first beer, a blonde ale, on sale in November 2013 (Wikipedia gives 2010 as the founding year). It made 40,000 bottles a month by mid-2014 and sold in about 500 outlets by January 2019, when the blonde ale was 70 per cent of sales. The first export, 7,000 litres, left for New Jersey in September 2016, and by 2019 Carakale was poured in some 50 bars in New York, Washington and Arizona. Its Dead Sea-rious gose, brewed with Dead Sea salt, was made with Arizona Wilderness Brewing. The company behind it is Colorado Trading Co. Ltd.
Biera Amman, which calls itself Amman's first brewpub, brews a lager, a red ale, a sweet stout and a wheat beer under the German purity law; BeerAdvocate has listed it since March 2023. BeerAdvocate also lists the Middle East International Investments Group of Amman as a brewer. Today the market is led by the Zarqa lagers, Amstel and Petra, with Carakale as the one craft brewery known abroad.
