Here is this week’s schedule (subject to changes as the new cycle requires):
Sunday: the music video, “I don’t hate,” which more or less shows how much people do hate, even if they are trying not to.
Monday : the numerous suggestions that it’s time for Israel to split into two countries (available in full to paid subscribers).
Tuesday: a podcast (available to everyone) with the founder of Jeremy’s Circle, an organization that provides support to the children of families who have a family member struggling with a critical disease.
Wednesday (today): a podcast (available in full to paid subscribers) with the founders of The Thinker’s Distillery, a distillery in Jerusalem that you’ve likely never heard of, which has a distinctly start-up-nation vibe.
Thursday: Israel tragically lost a brave, creative Israeli-Arab educator on Friday, when Dr. Dalia Fadila drowned off the Herzliya beach. When we ran our podcast with Dalia almost two years ago, many listeners were deeply moved. Many readers and listeners have joined us since then, so on Thursday, in her memory, we will re-run that interview, providing access to everyone. \
A few months ago, I was invited to a Shalem College event, which the invitation said was taking place at “The Thinker’s Distillery.” Pretty strange that there was a distillery in Jerusalem that I’d never even heard of, I thought. Adjacent to Machane Yehuda, the famous Jerusalem marketplace, the Distillery is on a busy street on which you’re mostly focused on not driving into other cars. So you can — as I had done dozens of times — drive right by and not even notice that it’s there.
But once you’re in, you’re in a world of gorgeous aesthetics. The bottles are simply stunning.
And the place is beautiful.
But there’s also a great story here. This is not just a distillery in Israel (which is in itself fairly uncommon), but a uniquely Israeli distillery. How so? In our conversation, Bennett Kaplan, whose brainchild The Thinker’s Distillery is, explained:
Our story is the story of the startup nation. Our story is not the story of our biblical ancestors. The startup nation doesn't invent anything. The startup nation takes what everybody else has done and figures out how to make it better. I put a word on that. For example, we did not invent social media. We just harnessed social media to get us out of traffic jams, otherwise known as Waze. We did not invent tomatoes. We just harnessed a tomato and made it something smaller. We call it a cherry tomato. We're not inventing things from scratch over here. We're looking around the world to see what everybody else has done. And then we're using kind of our gumption, this charming nature that we have that tells us, oh, we can do that, and we'll try to even do it better.
What did they take from elsewhere and improve with Israeli know-how? What’s the unique Israeli contribution to the gin- and vodka-making process?
That’s what Bennett explains.
For those still visiting Jerusalem this summer, you can go online and set a time to visit. For those not here, as Bennett explains, their spirits will soon be widely available outside Israel, so you can start to enjoy even before you visit.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below is a transcript for those who prefer to read, available only to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
We're going to do something a little bit different today. We cover politics. We cover literature, we cover history, we cover art, we cover major places in Israel. We've really tried to show every little different color of the mosaic, one might say. But today we're actually adding a new design to the mosaic or new color to the mosaic. A couple of months ago, I had occasion to be at an event in Jerusalem sponsored by Shalem College, where I work, for some of our donors from America. And I was told it was at the Thinkers Distillery. And I kind of looked at it a second time and thought, where is that? Turns out it's right in the center of Jerusalem, a stone throw from Mahane Yehuda. Very well-known Jerusalem outdoor market, cultural site at night. And I went there really not knowing what to expect. And what I found was really a fascinating place. It is gorgeous. It's beautifully designed. They make a whole bunch of things, including gin and vodka and some other drinks, which I sampled that evening, though in moderation, because I was also the speaker that night. And when the evening was over, I said to myself, I got to find out who's behind this story and tell people about this. Largely because Jerusalem is overflowing with tourists now, and they may be wondering, what's a new thing if I've been here a bunch of times that I could do differently. And also, people who are planning in the future to come, and because the product of Thinkers Distillery is going to be available worldwide, or at least in America very shortly. So, I did a little bit of Googling and I got to Bennett Kaplan, who is one of the leaders of the enterprise, and I'm sitting with Bennett now. Thank you very much for taking the time.
Thank you for having me.
So, let's start with the whole question of how does a nice Jewish boy end up making booze? A very quick story about where you were born, how you got to Israel, how you got into this business, and then we'll talk about the business itself.
I’m from Queens. Lived in New Rochelle before I made Aliyah 32 years ago. I'm a lawyer by training. I'm a rabbi. I have a bunch of different degrees in a lot of different areas. I'm your classic autodidact. I never really stay in a business any longer than I have to because at some point I want to change and move on.
How long you been in this one?
This business I started in 2018.
Oh. So, it's really new. Okay.
It's very, very new. And why this business? First of all, I like to drink, and I've always liked to drink, and I probably will always continue to like to drink. And the market itself had an opening that I thought was very unusual. There’s really no great distilleries in Israel. There are very few distilleries in the country. There's a whiskey distillery that's very famous, but other than that, there wasn't anything happening over here. And the distillery world has basically become a worldwide phenomenon. Distilleries were always basically associated with farms. The early distillers were farmers, and the reason for that is because they just wanted to get what was local and cheap in order to make their juice. But the world has gotten smaller. The shipping has gotten cheaper, a little bit expensive recently, but still cheaper. And the whole world is now basically sourcing materials from everywhere on the planet in order to accomplish the goals that they want to accomplish. How much of a Porsche is made in Germany? And you go on and on and on and on. So, the idea of starting a distillery in Jerusalem no longer seemed far-fetched, because though we don't have grains and we don't have particularly have very good source material that all can be imported and sourced.
But some of the source material you actually have created in Jerusalem, right? There's a specific angle to this which has science involved, which we'll come back to in a second. What is the story of distilleries in Israel in general? Everybody knows there's a burgeoning wine story here. We're not going to go into that. But there's obviously hundreds of Israeli wineries, and some of them really world class, a bunch of them not. But that's another conversation. What's the story of distilleries in general in Israel? You mentioned one very famous whiskey place.
I think there are five, maybe six distilleries, including ourselves. Most everybody's focusing on whiskey.
And you're doing?
Our first product was vodka. Second product was two different kinds of gins. And our third product that we just released recently is bourbon. But the bourbon we started in 2018, it's got age.
Now, scotch can only be called “scotch” if it's made in Scotland, obviously. Whiskey has to be sit in a barrel for three years, I think, before it can be called whiskey or something along those lines.
The laws of whiskey are that it has to be a grain distillate, aged or aged in a barrel.
Okay. And what allows you to call something bourbon?
So, every time you're using a name like bourbon or scotch or Irish whiskey, you have a dozen or so boxes to check in order to comply with the local ordinances and local laws, which we did. For example, bourbon has to be made in the United States, not the continent of the United States, any state it could be made in. It has to be made with at least 51% corn as its grain. It has to be put in a new American oak barrel that's been charred.
So how can you call yours bourbon then?
We did everything in America until we took it out of America and aged on the seas and aged it in Haifa and bottled it here.
Got it. But it'll still be able to be called bourbon because of the part that's taking place in the states?
It is called bourbon, yeah.
Okay, great. So now tell us what's different about the work that you're doing? What's unique about this Jerusalem distillery? I did a little bit of reading, and you guys use the verb furthering a lot, so it's an interesting word. Sounds very Israeli in a lot of ways. Why did you pick the word? What does it refer to, et cetera?
I'm glad you picked up on that. Our story is the story of the startup nation. Our story is not the story of our biblical ancestors. The startup nation doesn't invent anything. The startup nation takes what everybody else has done and figures out how to make it better. I put a word on that. For example, we did not invent social media. We just harnessed social media to get us out of traffic jams, otherwise known as Waze. We did not invent tomatoes. We just harnessed a tomato and made it something smaller. We call it a cherry tomato. We're not inventing things from scratch over here. We're looking around the world to see what everybody else has done. And then we're using kind of our gumption, this charming nature that we have that tells us, oh, we can do that, and we'll try to even do it better. And I was looking for a word to describe that, and I came up with the word furthered. And then I actually trademarked the word so that I'm the only person who can use it on alcohol. And basically, that word furthered describes exactly what we're doing. When I went, the first product we started with was vodka. Vodka is along with tequila blanco are the two hardest spirits to make at a high level.
Why?
Because every other spirit has something that can clothe its flavor and create balance where there wouldn't otherwise be balance. Whiskey has got a barrel. Gin has got botanicals. You can go on and on and on. But vodka is just pure ethanol, what should be pure ethanol. And there's a lot of other alcohols in there as well. And getting balance out of that is a really, really challenging job. In fact, most vodka manufacturers add sugar and citric acid in order to try to balance it. And most people put their vodka in the freezer in order to balance what was already supposed to be a balanced drink. Our vodka is so balanced that you drink it at room temperature, I think you probably did. And it's delicious. It goes down smooth. There's no aftertaste. There's nothing there that should imbalance it. Balance means there's no flavor that's too far to the left, no flavor that's too far to the right that disrupts the experience. And every flavor gets its chance, its turn to be tasted in the palate. And nobody'd ever done that with vodka before. Vodka is a brand-new product.
So, without giving away any state secrets, what are you guys doing differently as part of the startup nation vodka makers that is different from how other people are making vodka. Where's the magic sauce coming from that makes this so perfectly balanced?
Well, you'd have to divide that into three different categories. The first is we're starting with the finest grain that you can buy anywhere on planet Earth. You can't ever be better than your source material. If you want to make a leather coat or a suit, the material that you start with is going to determine the quality of it in the drape, et cetera. So, we started with soft winter wheat, red wheat that we get from Champagne, France. The reason the patisseries in France is so successful is not necessarily because of the bakers. They have the best wheat in the world. The second thing is that alcohol is a generic term that describes twelve or 13 different chemicals from acetone to propanol and a bunch of others. The second thing that we do is we remove all of those other alcohols. Those other alcohols are called congeners. They kind of hang on to the… what you want is ethyl alcohol or ethanol. They kind of hang on to the ethanol molecule and you have to get rid of them. It's a very big job, but many of them taste awful. Some of them taste okay. Many of them just taste absolutely awful. For example, acetone. You've ever tasted nail polish remover? I doubt it, but I have. It's awful and it smells awful as well.
The third thing is, in our vodka, at least 60% of what's in the bottle is water. I mean, it could be more or less depending on what your alcohol content is. That was 40%. That water, therefore, has a very, very major component to what's going to happen when that vodka enters your mouth and what the experience is going to be like. People don't really study water. What they do is they like to say, I've got mineral water, and they talk about that extensively. When you look at water, it has two components. One is flavor and one is mouthfeel. The flavor is not going to be that important. The mouthfeel is going to be critical. Why? On a hot summer day when you want to refresh yourself, you'll reach for a soda water or a very cold mineral water because it's sharp and it's hard and it cleans out the inside of your mouth. In fact, if you got a soft, warm, round water, you'd spit it out because you'd actually feel like you're just building on your thirst rather than quenching your thirst.
Alcohol is the sharpest beverage anybody's ever going to put in their mouth. So, what you're looking for is something to balance it in the opposite direction. We searched and searched, and we finally ended up going to Watergen. Watergen is a company here in Israel that manufactures water from air. And we work with their scientists in order to create water from the air that gives you the perfect round mouthfeel. And everybody makes that comment when they taste our drinks. It's like, wow, it tastes round.
Yes. I want to have you tell us a little bit more about how this water is made. I'll just tell you that a couple of years ago, three, four, five years ago, it was before COVID, so I guess it was longer. I was actually at an AIPAC policy conference in DC. And they have this basement where all these different Israeli companies are plying their wares and it was, I'm pretty sure, Watergen that had this thing that was machine. And you just ask for water. It takes a little bit of time, but it just kind of made water out of the air. It was kind of really unbelievable. So, you guys are partnering with them or using their technology or whatever. Tell us... I mean, it's not your technology specifically, it's theirs, but you've probably changed a little bit to work for you. But basically, how does this technology work?
Well, I mean, it's not as miraculous as you think it is because every air conditioner does it…
Right, it just drips onto your whatever…
It just drips onto the road underneath the car or something like that. Basically, what you're doing is you're separating the cold air molecules from the hot air molecules and with the hot air molecules comes the humidity. So, the Watergen machine is simply a super crazy efficient inverter, an air conditioner that just operates to take the humidity out of the air.
And they made the machine that you guys use?
Yes, they do. But because the water is going to be consumed, they have additional add on features that allows you to put in various kind of mineral filters so that you can get the flavor profile that.
Okay, so how long does it take to make this water? If you guys need, I don't know, x number of liters of water, where's the air coming from, how's it getting to you, where's the water coming from and how long does it take?
You're generating it constantly. It doesn't take any amount of time.
So, you're never waiting for water?
We're currently producing around 2,500 liters a day and if we need more, we'll buy another machine.
Got it. Okay, so the supply of water is not an issue unless air becomes in short supply, in which case we have much bigger problems then where we’re getting our water…
Unless humidity becomes in short supply.
Yeah, that's true. Okay, so you're producing vodka, you're producing gin, two kinds of gin. And you're going to launch or just launching bourbon.
We launched the bourbon in January.
Great. And now where can people get this? It's available in Israel and in the States. How do people find it? Tell us about the branding.
Currently, we're available in Israel. We're in about 600 locations and everybody knows us. We've hit the market in a very, very powerful way.
I'll just interrupt you and point out we'll put a picture in with this. You'll have to give us one that we're allowed to use. But the bottles are gorgeous, the design is gorgeous. The place itself, the distillery, the restaurant, the bar, whatever you want to call it, is unbelievably beautiful. But you see the bottles on the left-hand side when you come in right away. At least that's where they were that night. And they are also stunning pieces of work. So, people who are listening should click on the actual screen at some point. Even if you're in the woods listening to this podcast, taking a hike, go back to your screen at some point and take a look at the bottles. They're really stunning. So, it's available in 600 places in Israel. How about for the several thousand people listening to this who are in the States or other places and not in Israel?
We'll be available in New York, New Jersey and Illinois at the end of August. And we'll be available in the rest of the United States in December.
So, we're talking relatively soon.
Yeah.
And it'll be available basically where fine spirits are sold kind of thing?
Total Wine & More outside of New York, New Jersey and Illinois. Actually in New Jersey and New York. Total Wine & More there and Binny's in Illinois and pretty much all the fine liquor stores in New York.
That's amazing. So, the company is doing well?
The company is doing very well. We've never been turned down by a distributor. One of the things, and you mentioned the beauty of our bottles. One of the challenges that people have when they enter this industry is they bootstrap everything they start, and then they say, okay, where are we going to go from here? Where are we going to go from here? That's also a common Israeli concept because Israelis have great ideas, but they don't really come from a marketing background, so they don't know where to put it all together. We started the business first with our vision.
Who’s the “we”?
Me and my partner, Avi Ingber. We started at first with the vision. Once we had the vision, then came the bottle designs. Once we had the bottle designs, then we started to work on the products. I mean, we were always thinking about…
That sounds backwards to a layman like me, right? I know it's not backwards. You're going to explain it in a second, but it sort of sounds like Apple saying, we don't have an idea what this iPhone is going to be, but we have a really cool box to put it in. The boxes are cool. We all like how Apple packages their products, but one would think at least that the product is the main thing and that they probably design the packaging afterwards. Maybe they don't. I have actually no idea. But for a layperson like me, who knows nothing about producing anything, why would one start with designing the bottle first and then get to the product?
If you don't get the product right, you're going to fail, but if you don't have the packaging right, you will fail.
So, you need them both. Why?
And if you don't have your vision right, you will fail, because everything has to follow the vision.
Okay, and what's the vision in a word.
Super high quality, sophisticated current technology and science.
So, it's not about the farmer anymore in a barn somewhere. This has moved from farmers to scientists.
Exactly. And those farmers, had they been the smartest people in their generation, which they weren't, but let's say that they were, they would have given their right arm to have access to the knowledge of chemistry and the sense of taste and smell that we have today. The latter two, the sciences of taste and smell, 15- 20-year-old sciences in chemistry. They barely had a periodical table of the elements back in the late 18 hundreds when they formed their recipes, they'd give their right arm. Anybody would love to have what we have available today, but we're Israelis, and we take things further. We believe strongly that we could do things better. Did I have a doubt in my mind that I'd be able to produce a better product? I was insecure the entire time, but I knew that I had to get everything else right before I could put a product in the bottle. And I was also afraid that if I didn't have everything else right, I might compromise on the quality of the product. But once I had the packaging so perfect, I had to make sure that iPhone was perfect, too.
Okay. All right. So, you have the gorgeous place, you have the really amazing bottles, and everything looks really fabulous. It's unbelievable. A lot of scientists involved in this?
A lot of science. I've consulted with quite a number of scientists…
You don’t have any scientists actually working with you guys.
No.
So how many people do you employ in the making business, and how many of them were born, let's say, in Israel? How many of them come to Israel from overseas? Give us a picture of the team.
That's an interesting question. There are currently 13 people on the team, and only myself and my partner are from overseas.
So, it's really an Israeli gesheft as they would say.
100%.
Now, when you tell people in America, let's say, for example, that you want to market this and have it sold in New York, Illinois, New Jersey, wherever else, they know it's an Israeli product?
Of course. We have Hebrew on the label. It says “Made in Israel” on the back.
Has that been an issue at all?
It's been a very positive issue.
Okay, that's interesting.
It's been an extremely positive issue.
Okay, If I'm selling spirits somewhere in Illinois, I mean, I get that if I'm in the biotech world, Israel raises my eyebrows and I think, okay, that's cool. And I get if I'm buying military technology and it says Israel or some Israeli guy is coming to talk to me, I get why I'm listening. If I'm selling spirits in Illinois, why does “Made in Israel” appeal? Because we know that in a lot of places, made in Israel is a negative marketing issue. Unfortunately, Israelis are confronting that all over the world, especially in Europe. But not only. Why in the world of spirits, vodka, gin, bourbon is “made in Israel” a plus for the marketer in Illinois?
Until you just said what you said, I was completely unaware that being Israeli is a barrier to any market entry. In fact, every story that I've heard has been exactly the opposite.
Well, I mean, for example, our listeners who remember from way back probably years already, might remember the interview we did with Deborah Harris, who is Israel's leading literary agent, marketing Israeli works abroad, and she said, basically, in the world in which we're in, she probably gave that interview in 2021, you cannot basically market an Israeli author now to the international presses and get it translated and published the way that Amos Oz and David Grossman used to be, sort of without making any effort.
I think that's an industry specific challenge because the people who are apt to buy books are also apt to be, let's call it on the left side of the political spectrum. And the left side of the political spectrum right now is very hostile to Israel. But I'll tell you a very quick story. Teperberg Winery had many, many bottles of wine located in the largest chain of department stores in Holland. And somebody saw one of their labels was “Efrat” and mistakenly said that it must be made over the Green Line and posted some sort of social media post saying you got to boycott Teperberg and you got to boycott the store. By the end of the day, every single bottle of Teperberg wine was sold out. “Ken V’lo” had exactly the same thing in London, protests out front. It's an Israeli thing... By the end of the day, the store was cleaned out. It was sold out completely.
What's the point of that story?
That there's a lot of Israel supporters out there… but you’re probably not going to find them in the literary world. That's all.
Okay. I think there are other well, I mean, we're aware, for example, that Soda Stream, that's more a Green Line issue, but Soda Stream had to move from manufacturing over the Green Line to moving inside Israel.
I don't know if they had to.
They felt they had to…
They chose because they decided that they felt that having a BDS sticker on them is essentially equivalent of saying kick me. I don't know that I would have done the same thing. And I'll go one step further, I'd be willing to bet had they not done it, they would have been more successful…
Okay. Could be. I know nothing about this world of business or making fluids of any different sorts.
We have approached distributors so far in nine countries, and every single one of them said, “stop the presses. This is insane. An Israeli product that looks this good. If it tastes anywhere near as good as it looks, and it's coming from Israel, don't talk to anybody else. We want you.”
Wow. I mean, it's an amazing story. It's just very different from what we've been hearing from other kinds of angles. I'm thrilled. I mean, obviously, I live here, too, so I'm thrilled to hear it. And so, this will be available in other countries, I guess, relatively soon…
We'll be in the UK very shortly. We'll be in Canada. We just won a big tender in Canada.
What are the names of those stores in Canada people have to sell them at?
Well, I mean, every province has its own store, but the one you're thinking of is LCBO, which is the liquor in Ontario.
In Ontario. Right. Yeah. Okay.
Which is the largest purchaser of alcohol in the world.
And you're in there, I'm assuming?
Yes, last Thursday. We just won a major tender there.
Yeah. That's amazing. Okay, great. All right, now let's switch gears a little bit. So, you're pulling the water out of thin air, and you are pulling the wheat out of Champagne, France.
That's right.
And you're doing the finest work that can be done in terms of separating the various alcohols, and you're putting it into gorgeous bottles, and you've produced a really amazing product.
For those of you who can't see I'm nodding my head yes.
Yes. For those who can't see he's nodding his head yes, I got this story basically correct. Now, the people that are listening abroad are probably, hopefully marking down, “okay, this is going to be available in whatever month, in whatever place. And I'm going to make myself a note. I'm going to go check this out”. There are some people listening to this who are actually in Israel at this very moment. And there's some people listening to this who sometime during this summer are planning to come to Israel or have friends or family, whatever planning to come to Israel. What can they do to interact with Thinkers Distillery? We actually haven't talked about that. Why did you call it Thinkers Distillery? How did it get the name Thinkers? I should have asked you that at the beginning. I'm sorry.
The truth is that further and furthered and furthering are very hard words to say and because the idea of the Israeli startup nation is exactly that. It's thinking and what our neck label says, we have a copper neck label on every bottle. It says “eizohu chaham lomed mikol adam”, who is wise, the one who learns from every person. We're all thinkers. We're not the thinkers. We're all thinkers. We're learning from everybody. And that's what makes us so powerful. That's what gives us the ability to confront a world that's so hostile to us and still manage to survive it.
It's amazing. Okay, so let's go back to the other question. I'm in Jerusalem, or I'm coming to Jerusalem, or my parents or my kids or my cousins or my neighbors are coming to Jerusalem later this summer. Just heard about Thinkers Distillery, want to intersect with it in some way. What are the options available for people?
We have tours. And you were on one of those tours. We get about 1000- 1500 people a month through our doors on tours.
People can make reservations online?
People can make reservations online. Thinkersdistillery.com. You go on there, it's in English and it's in Hebrew and it's very easy to make a reservation. We have a short tour of 45 minutes, a longer tour of 2 hours.
They both come with tastes I assume.
You will definitely leave having tasted everything, including several cocktails that we'll provide you with. Or you could just walk into the distillery. We're open from 11:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night, and it's our only store. If you come in there, you can buy. We're in 600 other stores, but that's through our distributor, Kerem.
Okay. So, you've been in the business now since 20…
18.
18. So we're five years in more or less, relative to where you thought you'd be five years ago. How are we doing?
We're delayed because of the pandemic. Basically, introducing a new product during the pandemic is a foolish business because people were just buying what they already knew. Anybody who walked into a store walked into the store afraid that he was going to die. So, he ran in, covered his face and grabbed what he had to grab. So, we had to delay our release until the pandemic was over. So, we actually haven't been selling… We started selling last September, less than a year ago.
That would explain partly why somebody who lives in Jerusalem, I didn’t know, it was there because it really hasn't been operational in that sense for a very long time… But since then, gangbusters?
Yeah, in Israel, we're doing amazingly well. In fact, we had our meeting with our distributor this morning and they told us we're the only brand that has four different products and all four of them sell equally. That all the customers love everything we've got. There's nobody saying, no, this is better, this is worse. Across the board, they're astonished by it.
Well, it's a very Israeli story. So, I'll just say as we wrap up again, I knew nothing about it. I was invited to an event there. It was gorgeous and it was delicious. And it turns out in the end that it's also a very Israeli story, just because of the furthering notion of startup nation taking something that everybody's doing, which is making spirits and doing it a little smarter, a little better. Adding a little je ne sais quoi, as they say in the country, from which you get your grain, to the mix and producing a product that is really kind of a worldwide now sought product. Again, as I think a lot of our listeners and readers would not be at all surprised to hear about that in the tech world. They would not be surprised to hear about that in the wine world, are no longer surprised to hear about it in the world of culture and Netflix and movies and even music. They probably, if you had said to them, list the 15 areas where you think Israelis or Israeli companies are making a leap ahead. I don't think anybody would have listed gin, bourbon, vodka, really don't think anybody would have listed it. And the truth is, obviously that you're part of a very, very important story about Israel. You're part of a story that is what made Israel so resilient and so vibrant. And to hear about this particular additional aspect of the startup nation and the work that it's doing is super important and I can guarantee for the people who are going to take us at our word, really delicious in addition to everything else. So, Bennett, thank you for your time. Thanks for telling us the story. Lot of luck with the product.
Thank you. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to speak to your audience. And thank you very much for your wishes.
Look forward to coming back and buying some more.
Thank you.
Impossible Takes Longer is now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
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Drinking away our sorrows at this Jerusalem- based distillery