Or Pete gives me a glass of his latest home brew
which
is so strong I am in bed by 9pm
(Jan’s Letter home May 77)
Libya, since the revolution has been dry. No alcohol of any sort can be bought or sold. It is possible to obtain smuggled whisky, but at an incredible cost, I have been quoted seventy five dinars for a single bottle. That's over 200 New Zealand dollars. Far too much for an impecunious UN expert.
However, the authorities turned a blind eye to expatriates making their own alcohol. So long as there was no sign of it being sold to Libyan Nationals, no one seemed to worry. The police certainly knew alcohol was being consumed, they couldn't help but know as some of the parties I attended could be heard over half of Benghazi. They never bothered us apart from sometimes parking outside, presumably to check on who came and went. For all that we had to be very careful regarding drink and driving, because if you were picked up and suspected of being under the influence, you were simply arrested, put in cells, and left there.
This was not a good experience, as the police did not feed their prisoners, nor did they advise anyone that you were there. This happened to one of the single men working on a construction project. His absence went unnoticed for a couple of days, then it took another day to track him down. A very repentant and very hungry young man was finally freed after paying a hefty fine. His repentance did not last long as he was caught again some months later, but this time as well as a hefty fine he was deported and probably lost his job as well.
So there was no problem if you wanted to make your own alcoholic drinks. Most people brewed beer as this was the easiest option. Some made wine of various sorts, some distilled pure alcohol called "flash", but most made beer.
Both Jan and I were social drinkers, so once we settled in our new house I started looking around for the apparatus and recipes for home brew. Sure enough we were put on to a family who were on their way home and had gear for sale. I went off to check it out and arrived home triumphantly with:
1.. Brewing container. This was a plastic rubbish bin. It was important to check that the bin had "por alimentary" stamped on the bottom. Which meant it was suitable for storing food. This was important as it meant it had a special plastic lining and would not stain.
2.. Several dozen bottles. These were clear glass bottles of 1 litre, and originally held a popular drink called Bangasheer. This was a mineral water type drink, which came from the village of Bangasheer and was an excellent thirst quencher on a hot day. The bottles came in plastic crates and could hold the pressure of beer, they had crown tops so were just the thing for a dedicated home brewer.
3.. Crown tops. These were something of a problem, it was not possible to buy them, so they had to be saved. I was somewhat puzzled when I first arrived to see people carefully easing off a crown top and putting it aside. I soon learned they were for re-use on beer bottles.
4.. Recipe. This was fairly standard, as follows: 30 litres of water: 2 kilogram’s of sugar: 1 large tin of Maltexo: 1 teaspoon of hop extract: 1 teaspoon of yeast. The sugar, Maltexo, and hops were brought to boiling in a few litres of water and added to the rest of the water in the brewing container. The yeast was then sprinkled on top and that was it.
5.. Some bits and pieces, like a device for putting on crown tops, and a siphoning tube.
Once I got this all set up in a hall cupboard I was in the brewing business. All ingredients except the hop extract were readily available. Sugar was subsidised and very cheap, Maltexo (a well known malt extract) was available at any chemist shop, as was yeast. Although it was bakers yeast, it did the job pretty well.
Brewing itself was no real problem, a beer of some sort would usually result. However, care was necessary, to produce a GOOD beer. Sterilising the equipment was essential. I found that simply using boiling water on all brewing items before and after brewing was sufficient to produce a reasonably consistent beer. Once a brew was started, it had to be watched fairly carefully, particularly in hot weather.
Above 23 Celsius fermentation took place rapidly. The trick was to judge when the process was nearly complete and then bottle immediately. With a teaspoon of sugar in each bottle, secondary fermentation took place and if you got everything just right, a clear sparkling beer was the result. Get it wrong and, well, disaster.
Probably the worst scenario is to bottle too soon. In that case fermentation continues in the bottle, building up pressure till something gives. Either the crown top blows off or - more likely - the bottle explodes. In fact all the bottles explode. It happened to me, but only once. The family still talks about the night the home brew blew up.
Unfortunately not everyone pays sufficient attention to detail and some of the brews were, to put it mildly, terrible. My next-door neighbour and good friend! in my opinion consistently made the worst home brew I ever tasted. The problem was he kept running out and would borrow a dozen of mine, which he would duly replace with a dozen of his. I never told him that most of his ended up down the plughole of the kitchen sink.
When someone held a party it was usually B Y O. which raised the problem of how to transport the beer. Bottles of home brew always had a cm or so of sediment in the bottom. Shaking the bottle stirred this up and ruined the clarity of the beer. The answer was the Gottcool.
Everyone had one or more Gottcools. These were German made insulated containers with a wide mouthed top and a tap on the bottom. So, before going to a party, cool bottled beer was carefully decanted into a Gottcool then taken to the festivities, where it joined the dozen or more others already lined up. It was interesting to note as the evening went on which Gottcools emptied first as people quickly decided which was the best beer. If you found your Gottcool still had beer in it when you went home you knew your brew was not up to scratch.
Not all parties were quite as couth as this, I can remember some where the beer ran out and the Gottcools were replenished straight from bottles sediment and all.
Some of the expatriates had quite ornate bar facilities and took great pride in serving a good variety of alcoholic drinks in very pleasant surroundings. Charlie and Irene Ross for instance had two bars, one inside and an outdoor one by their swimming pool. The Ross's lived a few doors away in Shebco and were the longest resident of all the expatriates we met. They had been there since before the revolution and were well settled. Thursday afternoons in the summer were reserved as the day to visit the Rosses, the children could play in the pool while the adults socialized at the bar. Almost everyone we knew would be there at one time or another.
By mixing various flavourings in exact proportions with the locally made flash, it was quite possible to produce excellent liqueurs. These tasted very like their famous originals, such as Cointreu, Tia Maria, Benedictine and so on. Though no one could ever approximate a Drambui. No one even tried.
Flash, (Ethyl alcohol) was readily available, being distilled by several expatriates who made quite a good thing of it. It could be bought a litre a time and was already cut 50% with water. This made it 40% alcohol by volume, the standard spirit strength. It was now ready to drink with a normal mixer such as Pepsi or lemonade or whatever. It had a very characteristic flavour. It didn't matter what you mixed it with, the flash taste was always there in the background. Still, it was better then nothing.
There was an American couple, man and wife, middle aged, both with scientific doctorates, who were well known suppliers of flash. At one stage, they had three stills running. Both of them were alcoholics. A fact that they freely admitted to, and which didn't seem to worry them at all. They were also renowned for their spectacular fights, a fact that Jan could confirm as usually the wife came off second best and would come round to Jan for sympathy and consolation.
Once when they went on leave we arranged for three young English technicians from the Marconi Company to house sit for them. They moved in to the house after the couple left and almost immediately appeared at our door. It seems all three stills were running and a whole series of messages were pinned up around the house detailing the procedures necessary to keep the product flowing. They finally became resigned to the fact that they would have to become temporary distillers of illegal hooch and in the end produced a good result. They had in fact picked up an unexpected skill by the time they returned to England.
Therefore, as far as the expatriate community was concerned social drinking was no problem, even though it was all done in private homes. There was no such thing as meeting friends in a bar or hotel for a beer as such places disappeared after the colonels took over in 1969. The only sign of Libya as it used to be was the cafe restaurant on the ground floor of the Omar Khayam hotel. The bar and fittings were still in place although they only served coffee and soft drinks.
Not all Libyans obeyed the no alcohol rule, now and then one of the wealthier locals would throw a party for the expatriates and would provide a couple of crates of Scotch. I hate to think what it cost and it was served rather discreetly but it seemed there was an unlimited supply available. The food on these occasions was far from discreet, usually two sheep being spit roasted, one at each end of a large patio. A businessman whose sideline was breeding Arabian horses owned the estate where these occasions took place. Anna aged three had her first horse ride on a purebred Arabian stallion.
Next page. Chapter 10 Winter comes