Libyan Moonshine

During the late 1970s I lived with my wife, Jeanne, and three kids in Marsa-el-Brega, Libya, about halfway between Tripoli and Benghasi. It was a large fenced enclave, about five miles across, surrounded by the Great Sahara Desert to the south and the Gulf of Sirte, the southern reach of the Mediterranean Sea, on the north.

Exxon had turned Brega into a large terminal for exporting crude oil and LNG. Moammar Qaddafi was still a joke then; he hadn't yet been firmly linked to terrorism. He held schizophrenic news conferences with western journalists in a bedouin tent in the desert, wearing traditional Libyan clothes: embroidered vest, long shirt and those goofy tight-legged cotton pants with a huge, baggy seat. The Koran apparently says that when Mohammed comes again, he will be born of man, so every devout Libyan man wants to be ready in case he's the chosen one. No, we won't go any deeper into that.

Brega in those days was a fairly comfortable place in many respects. Streets were paved, houses were nice and the community had tennis, scuba diving, golf and even a paved go-cart racing track. About 250 engineers and managers lived with their families in a residential area a mile or so from the plant facilities. Exxon provided a school for kids from kindergarten up to ninth grade, and subsidized tuition at a private high school after that.

Brega also had a big downside. Shopping was awful and alcohol was outlawed. This meant that nearly all foreigners in Brega bootlegged - beer and spirits mostly. Some people made wine with bottled, pasteurized grape juice and brewer's yeast, but the results were so bad that most didn't bother.

Local police had an unofficial agreement with Exxon to overlook drinking, so long as booze wasn't given or sold to muslims. Making booze is pretty simple, and the Brega community did it in volume. Just add bread yeast to a sugar water solution, let it ferment for two or three weeks in a container that is sealed from the air, and that allows the carbon dioxide to vent off. When it quits "working", put it in a still and that bit of yeast turns six pounds of sugar into about a gallon of 190-proof alcohol, called "flash". Dilute it to drinking strength with water, and you've got a dozen fifths of pure booze for the price of the sugar. And in Brega, sugar was cheap! To show solidarity with Comrade Castro, Libya imported Cuban sugar and subsidized the price. Knowing that Qaddafi thus inadvertently subsidized our booze made it all the better.

A small trading post just outside the Brega compound sold this government subsidized sugar in 110-pound burlap sacks for the equivalent of six dollars. The volume of sugar sold at this little tin-roofed, dirt-floored, caliche-stone shack must have put it up there with the biggest supermarkets in Houston, and surely gave Brega the highest per capita sugar consumption of any town in the world.

Fermenting of sugar is an ancient process that's difficult to screw up to the point of being dangerous. Assuming even a bit of cleanliness, yeast does not turn sugar into anything harmful that doesn't taste awful. You'd have to be very determined to get drunk to make yourself sick.

While making alcohol is easy, separating it from the yeast and water is more complicated. Alcohol solutions can leach poisonous heavy metals from the boiling pot and tubing if they are made of the wrong materials. Hot alcohol vapors can also explode if they escape to the air and ignite. One Brega resident learned this the hard way, blowing the kitchen wall out of his prefab house when his condenser failed. He told investigating police officials that he sprayed fly spray behind the stove and it ignited from the pilot light. Nobody believed him, including the officials, but the number of roaches and other bugs in camp made it plausible enough, so it was "kwes katir", "all right".

It was mishaps like this that led the oil companies in Saudi to unofficially commission an instruction manual called "The Blue Flame" after the test for purity - lighting a spoonful of flash should give a blue flame. A yellow tipped or colored flame indicates something is wrong.

           Stainless steel tubing and pipe were the heart of the LNG plant, and most jobs intentionally had material left over. Exxon's pipe fitters and welders could turn these "scraps" of left over material into elegant little home stills in a couple of hours. Naturally, most houses had a still and turned out flash as needed.

Some Brega brewers went to additional lengths to dress up their product. Budweiser makes a big deal over its beech wood aging process. Their slick TV ads bring to mind large wooden beer barrels, aging in cool cellars, waiting for the Clydesdale-drawn wagons to haul them away to thirsty beer drinkers. In practice, beech wood aging is nothing more than dumping a pile of wood chips into a huge stainless steel vat of aging beer and letting them soak for a few days.

            Bregans used a very similar process on their flash. Fioretti's, a small home-brewing supply company in New York, had a thriving business providing flavorings to home brewers and distillers living in the middle-eastern oil patch. They sold toasted oak chips in three-pound plain paper bags. A handful of these oak chips - resembling sawdust from a chain saw - when soaked for a couple of weeks in a bottle of pure flash alcohol would color it a nice amber and change the flavor noticeably. The yeasty, overripe taste of the flash became cleaner, with some hint of whiskey - oakwood aging in the fast lane. Guests at Brega house parties would be offered the choice of "white" or "brown".

Though safer, beer making was far more complicated than flash making, requiring more ingredients and equipment. Getting this stuff required imagination and some risk-taking, but again the Libyan government unknowingly helped. Drug stores in Benghasi carried cans of malt syrup extracted from malted grain, intended as dietary supplements for babies and lactating mothers. By varying the ratio of this malt syrup you could produce anything from a pilsner to an amber ale. Hops were more of a problem, but most brewers made do with a thick, tar-like hops paste available from the English drugstore chain, Boots. The stuff was so concentrated that a couple of teaspoonfuls gave a five-gallon batch of beer all the hops of a bitter ale. A pint can of this paste would make almost 2,000 gallons of very bitter beer, so everybody on an entire street would share a single can. Whenever it ran low, whoever was due next for home leave set aside scarce luggage space for a new can.

Bottles were the biggest problem for beer makers. Everyone had a jealously guarded supply, but here again, Qaddafi's subsidy programs helped out. Sterilized milk, also subsidized, came in quart bottles, with tops identical to a soda pop (or beer) bottle. They took a home brew cap nicely and were strong enough to hold the pressure of properly bottled beer. Mistakes, including flaws in the glass, were frequent enough that every Brega home brewer knew the heart breaking sound of bottled brew exploding in a closet or garage, and had a war story about flying glass. He also had a constant need for bottles.

Caps had to be brought from abroad in suitcases or supplemental shipments, so bottles were opened carefully, and the caps reused as often as possible. Several capping machines were shared around town, so getting one at the right time was never a problem.

            We even made our own liqueurs. Orange liqueur required some patience, but the results were rewarding. For this you needed a large jar or crock with an opening big enough to fit a fresh orange through. Fill the jar to within six inches of the top with flash, and enough sugar to make it syrupy, then suspend an orange an inch or two above the liquid. (Sewing thread works nicely, but you want to avoid monofilament fishing line, as it tends to dissolve in alcohol fumes. The orange then drops into the liquid, giving you a moldy, ugly mess.) Seal the jar and put it away for a couple of weeks. The alcohol fumes extract oils from the peel, making a passable orange liqueur.

            With a few other items from Fioretti's, making other kinds of booze was much easier. Flavorings came in two-ounce bottles, like vanilla, only different. Gin, scotch and bourbon were popular, but brandy, Drambuie and my personal favorite, Amaretto, were also available. Just dilute the flash to the desired strength, add a couple of drops of flavoring to the bottle and, with a little imagination, (OK, a lot of imagination) you were drinking your favorite liqueur.

Another uncomfortable aspect of Brega life was that shopping in Libya was awful. Qaddaffi toadied up to the Soviet Union and imported much of Libya's consumer goods from Eastern Europe. Quality was generally bad, and supplies always short. Shirts might have one sleeve longer than the other, or puckered seams. Once we found a hairy cow's ear in a can of Bulgarian corned beef. The few western goods were seconds or ‘way past their shelf life. Sometimes we got American cereal, but with a sell-by date two years in the past. Some British goods had prices printed on the label in shillings and pence - a money system they eliminated in the late 1960s.

Please check my other Gather story "An American Family in Libya"