Pavo brewery (Israel)

Nachi Bargida filling a glass Zikhron Ya’akov, Israel
Micro breweries are popping up in Israel like in the rest of the world, and Pavo is one of them, it is located on the same hill as Carmel ,the winery in Zikhron Ya’akov (but it’s very different in terms of size and production). Also, the tiny brewery is interesting because its founder Nachi Bargida has chosen not to use any additives in the making of his beers, and if it were located in Germany it could well postulate for the Reinheits Gebot label, the centuries-old purity law certifying that a beer is made using nothing else other than the traditional raw materials. Usually the favorite beer in Israel these days when you look for something fresh and reasonably good is a Gold Star (the brewery is owned by the Tempo group) which you will pay usually 8 shekels in a shop (1,6 € or 2,4 USD), but it is an industrial product and Pavo is a completely different story and quality. Let's remind that Israel is a hot country much of the year and that you don't think to wine first when the temperatures are so high, so many people will just have beer.
Driving back to where we came a couple days before (Carmel), we parked very close to the Carmel winery near the top of the hill overlooking the valley (picture on right). The tiny brewery sits there in the immediate proximity of the wine giant. It looks at first like an open-air restaurant or a Beergarten, and Nachi Bargida wanted it that way as he wants the place to be in the spirit of casual beer venues in Germany, where people enjoy drinking beer with also some food if they want. The restaurant part had just opened a couple of weeks before this visit.

The brewery (background) and its Beergarten The founder of Pavo, which means peacock in Latin, is coincidently a descendant from the early settlers who came here to work at the Carmel winery. After a successful carreer in the tire business around the world, Nachi Bargida decided that he wanted to make something else of his life, settle down and work on something more authentic and beautiful. Beer making was the right thing to do, he felt one day. There was still room for beer in Israel, and particularly for quality, artisanal beer.
The Beergarten above is the only such one in Israel. All its equipment, tables & seats has been imported from Germany. The serving sizes are not German though, no one-liter or half-liter mugs, but 33-centiliter ones. The philosophy is that it's the right way to drink beer here : the cool temperature hasn't time to go away and this is a better sizing for Israel. Still, it's an evening thing, when the sun goes down and the breeze makes life easier, and there will be every week musicians here with no extra fee other than the normal price of a beer. The brewery We walk into the brewery, not that a big room when you think that everything is made in here. When you think that all the beers made at Pavo come through this esoteric-looking machine, you undestand what artisan beer really means.
There is a small lab in the corner, that's where they do all their checks and analysis. They by the way do some analysis work for third parties like for example even smaller breweries which don't have the tools. The lab part is very important to make a quality beer. You need to see for example to know if there are any unwanted bacterias, you want to measure the viscosity of the liquid, the foam, the bitterness, the color, the alcohol and the sugar.
After looking around, when he set up this brewery, he decided to buy Slovakian tools. Nachi Bargida says that today Slovakia is the biggest producer of beer-making equipment, also because the Germans began setting up their own machine plants in this country where the workforce is cheaper. The company who made the brewing machine is PSS, it is located in eastern Slovakia. The technicians at Pavo made several trips there to help redesign the machine and have it manufactured according to their needs, because of a feature they wanted to include or sometimes a curve on a pipe they considered useful. The machine is custom made with a lot of sensors here and there to check vital data. The copper is only for beauty, it's stainless-steel in fact and anyway they're not allowed to have any copper come into contact with food or beverage products anymore. The 12-hectoliter fementing tanks (weird color, sorry) They make beer by batches of 600 liters at a time, at the pace of 2 batches a day, that is 1200 liters. The full capacity of the brewery is 14 600 liters per month. Right now they're producing some 7000 liters a month as they've been starting very recently with the distribution of the beer in Israel (only two-month before). With the Pessah time when observant jews aren't supposed to drink, the real beginning of the sale season has been early may. Nachi Bargida says that he thinks that the decade of beer is just beginning in Israel. It has been through two decades of wine with all these new qualitative wineries opening but beer is going to have its day...
We walk to a separate room with several temperature-controlled tanks. The open-air room is protected from the sun with a green plastic sheet which gives a weird coloring to the whole place (the municipality hasn't yey approved the planned roof here, but they'd need one for the working environment). The bottling takes place in this same room.
They're making kosher beer here but it's not like wine, it doesn't mean that gentile or non-observant jews can't touch the machines or the vats, plus there's no blessing or religious ritual to make over the beer. The regulation is actually very basic, you just pay and have the rabbi come once in a while to check the installation, and you just order the raw materials to a company which respects the basic kosher rules, that's it.
Speaking of the yeasts, they're theorically re-usable for ever but they decoded to use a batch of yeast for 10 fementation batches and then take new ones. The choice of yeast coupled with the temperature control allows to produce the different desired beers. The bottling line He orders the raw materials from Germany, the malt, wheat, hop and yeasts. Before choosing the type of beer he would make here, he had 6 months of blind tastings at his home, after which he chose which beer he would make, then reproduced the beer in his kitchen (even though his wife didn't appreciate the whole experiment). Then he sent the samples to the beer institute in Bavaria where they have lots of researchers and technicians, and these people made the reverse analysis from the samples that they sent them, so that they could reproduce exactly the same quality of beers. Thereafter at Pavo, they just had to make cosmetic adjustments to finetune the beers regarding the aromas and the mouthfeel. They also made a pilot reproduction in Bavaria of the Pavo brewing process, with the same yield and so on with computers help, and after a month or so they got the final recipe of what thet wanted to make... At the difference with wine, he says, there's no vintage or terroir wit beer, and a chosen quality of beer must be reproduced without variations. If the raw materials, the agricultural products have variations in qualities, they check it at the lab and work differently if a given delivery has a different ph for example. Control panel The brewing machine has 3 tanks, says Nachi Bargida, the hot-water tank, the kettle (or the mash) and the lauter tank (or the filter). The water is heated at 55 ° C, iy is transferred to the mash and they add the malt. The malt rests there between 45 minutes and 1 hour and they slowly increase the temperature to 75 ° C because they want to push the different enzymes to start processing the starch into sugar. Once finished, they get sugary water with grains, and they transfer both into the other tank, the lauter tank. I'll not explain all the process (considering that I'm not even sure I understand it in the first place), but listening to Nachi Bargida I realize that this is almost a scientific operation. Reproducing all the parameters of the beer that you chose as a model means that you have to be rather square and meticulous to leave no chance to surprises. I understand that this is a big difference with winemaking where there will be most of the time (especially on the artisan side) some variations depending of the vintage and other not-always-manageable circumstances. Grains Speaking of the tank where the sugary water goes during the brewing process, Nachi Bargida says that at this particular stage all the commercial beers receive addings like more sugar, coloring liquids and also biological enzymes. Here he says, it's all done naturally, they use the enzymes from the seeds, the sugar which is already in the seeds, and the color is nothing more than what the different malts bring.
The only thing that could be considered an additive in this beer making, Nachi Bargida says, is that they add minerals in the water that they use. We know that water quality makes a big difference for many beverages. Here in Zikron, the water is considered too rich in calcium and other minerals, so they got it distilled first to get it neutral, then they give it back the right minerals. This costs a lot of money but it was the only way to work with a water quality that could suit their goals. Also, they can this way have at easy rich what could be the equivalent of different water sources, depending of the proportion and nature of minerals that they use. They are not tied to a single type of water and it helps a lot when you want to make different type of beers, because again, the water plays an important part. Of course, the re-mineralisation of the water is done on a very precise and homeopathic mode so that it can reproduce a desired type of water. the Israeli Pale Ale (my choice) Fermentation time is different depending of the type of the beer, the ale ferments during one week, the lager for two weeks for example, and there are only 4 fermenters so they may be full often in the high season. After the fermenting stage, the beer goes to the aging tanks : ale stays 3 weeks there and lager one and a half month. Aging is for stabilizing purposes. Only one of the beers is filtered, the Pilz. No conservatives are added. There's a pasteurizing process at 60 ° C, it doesn't do harm on the taste, sometimes it even improves a bit. It allow a 6-month life on the shelves. Some kegs are unpasteurized, when the customer/bar has a cold storage room.

Pavo makes 6 type of beers right now but is planning to make 13 different beers. Here is what I tasted at the brewery's bar (there's an indoor bar too).
__ Pavo Israeli Pale Ale. 5,3 °. Very nice, refreshing beer with savoury substance, that's food ! Lovely beer.
__ Pavo Redish Lager. 4,7 °. Less pleasant when you just has this IPA.
__ Pavo Pilz. Pale color. 5 ° alcohol. Nice Pilz even if I still prefer the first one. The shape of the glass changes with the type of beer.
__ Pavo Stout. Almost black color. Aromas of coffee and chocolate, very surprising and interesting. Very nice indeed, with the right bitterness at the end.
__ Pavo Wheat. (HefeWeiss beer). 4,6 °. Great beer, Paulaner has a competitor here...
These beers sell for about 15 or 16 Shekels in town. Nachi Bargida says that in Tel Aviv they can be found in places like Mashkaot (English page), or in bars like Porter & Sons (English page), also in Temple Bar (English page). Pavo brewery 14 Ma’aleh Rishonim Street, Givat ZamarinZikhron Ya'akov phone +972 4 639 89 88 www.pavo.co.il The beers