Oil Patch

Some Brega brewers went to additional lengths to dress up their product. Budweiser makes a big deal over its beech wood aging process. Slick TV ads were designed to evoke wooden beer barrels, aging in cool cellars, waiting for Clydesdale-drawn wagons to haul them away to thirsty beer drinkers. In practice, beech wood aging is just dumping a pile of wood chips into a huge stainless steel vat of aging beer and letting them soak for a few days.

Bregans were years ahead of Bud, using 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 also 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 – oak wood 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 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 pilsner to 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 neighbors would share a single can. Whenever it ran low, the next neighbor due for home leave set aside scarce returning 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 came in quart bottles, with tops identical to a soda pop (or beer) bottle and they 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.