Kibbutz that fought off Oct. 7 terror endeavors to develop Israeli version of tequila
Kibbutz Alumim in the Gaza border area partners with experts to plant agave succulents in Negev desert terroir, hoping to produce local mezcal spirit within a few years
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
On October 7, 2023, several dozen Hamas terrorists entered Kibbutz Alumim in the Gaza border area, where the small Israeli community’s civil defense squad held them off for hours.
Not one member of the religious kibbutz was killed, although 19 Thai and Nepalese workers were slaughtered, along with three members of the security forces who came to defend the kibbutz and a civilian who was escaping the attack on the nearby Supernova rave. At least five foreign workers were taken hostage to Gaza.
The entire kibbutz of 120 families was subsequently evacuated to two hotels in Netanya in light of the ensuing war.
Within several days, farmer Eran Braverman — who, along with his son and others, helped save the kibbutz on that black Shabbat day — was back in the Alumim fields, taking care of their crops of potatoes, carrots and blue agave, a spiky Mexican succulent being raised at Alumim to produce a local version of tequila.
Braverman, a tall, lean farmer with a shock of straight graying hair, isn’t much for tequila; he’s only tasted the distilled spirit a handful of times. He is, however, the agricultural force behind the 350 dunams of agave being grown at Alumim, which will be turned into mezcal, the term for the distilled spirit made from agave. (Only the agave-based spirit made in Mexico can technically be called tequila.)
Some five years ago, Alumim partnered with Avi Leitner and Avi Rosenfeld, two entrepreneurs who call themselves the Blue Agave Group, to grow agave.
Leitner, a New York-born lawyer, is married to Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, a lawyer who founded the Shurat HaDin legal group, which sues terrorists and their supporters.
The Leitners, Rosenfeld and Braverman ferried a group of reporters, distillers and culinary types around Alumim in late September, showing off their four-year-old crop and offering tastings of imported tequilas with lunch.
The Leitners first tried high-end tequilas in Mexico about ten years ago, an experience that changed their minds about the high-alcohol content drink that they had known as a quick, one-gulp ounce of spirit.
“Tequila is a horrible little drink you drank in high school and got sick from and never drank again,” said Leitner.
But once the Leitners tried the tastier, more sophisticated tequilas and visited an agave farm, the couple suspected the prickly succulent could work well as a crop in the Negev desert.
After several years of researching how to grow agave in Israel, searching for a kibbutz that wanted to work with them, and battling the Agriculture Ministry over how to import agave, Leitner said they ended up importing watery cell tissues of agave from Mexico, where they first grew them in a greenhouse for one year.
It’s all a big risk, one that has already cost $2 million and will cost another $3 million to produce the first batch, but Leitner is banking on the fact that tequila is the world’s fastest-growing spirit, bigger than vodka or whisky.
They’re also invested in creating “an authentic Jewish Zionist project,” said Leitner.
It’s authentic, but not without its own set of problems, all discovered in several years of developing this prickly crop.
While the Negev desert is similar to Mexico in its dry, arid climate and sandy soil that the agave adheres to, there are differences in rain and moisture and in local bugs and bacteria, a host of details that could make all the difference in developing Israel’s own mezcal.
“We had to learn as we go,” said Braverman, adding that he loves a challenge after being in charge of 17,000 dunams (4,200 acres) of farmland for the last 40 years.
That included figuring out how much water to give the succulent in the summer — and none during Israel’s rainy winter — how to control the weeds that cropped up around the plants, and how best to develop the agave’s sugars that are ultimately distilled into spirits.
Their latest field was planted a little differently, with succulents placed one meter apart and inserted inside sheets of blue nylon, that seem to be controlling the weeds.
“It’s a crazy idea to grow agave in Israel, but we decided to go with it,” said Braverman, noting that another type of agave was once grown in the Negev in the 1950s, though that was for textiles. “We learn from working with it.”
The agave is not watered at all during the Israeli winter, certainly far less than the kibbutz’s other crops of potatoes, sweet potatoes and carrots.
Agave plants tend to be grown for five to seven years in Mexico, although Braverman and his investors are hoping to speed the process up a bit, given that their four-year-old plants look similar to the five-year-old plants they saw last summer in Mexico.
“The agriculture component is massive and ongoing,” said Leitner. “But we feel good investing in local farmers and workers in the Negev.”
Once the fruit is ready, hopefully within the next year or two, the process of extracting the agave bulb, which looks like a giant round white pineapple and can weigh more than 40 kilograms (88 pounds), is laborious, often requiring tractors that pull it out of the ground.
The juices are extracted by slicing the bulbs in two and then baking them in the oven for up to 48 hours, before crushing the fruit to extract the sweet juice, which is fermented with yeast to convert the sugar into alcohol and distilled. In Mexico, the ovens are often built outside, near the agave fields.
“We’ll have to think about a mechanical route,” said Braverman, who thinks his plants have another two years to go before they’re ready. “I’m a tourist in that part of the process.”
Despite Mexico being the origin of the agave plant, there are benefits to growing it elsewhere, as the plant has a terroir, much like that of grapes and wine, said Domingo Garcia, a Mexican sociology professor who studies tequila and is one of the experts hired by the Blue Agave Group.
“Mexico is the protector of agave but we share it with humanity,” said Garcia. “It’s being produced in Israel with old-school Mexican knowledge. What’s authentic is that it’s being grown and produced here.”
There are benefits to creating a tequila-like spirit in Israel, as it doesn’t have to be aged as long as other spirits such as whisky. Leitner is planning to base the distillery and visitor’s center in the northern Negev, close to the fields but with easier access to the center and the customers.
He’s also planning on conquering the local market with the “young and sexy” spirit but hopes to also export it.
“God willing, we’ll be able to sell in both places and ship to the US which is the largest tequila market in the world,” said Leitner.
Even better, he hopes to eventually sell his Sabra mezcal to the region that started it all — back to Mexico.
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