The Day the Stil Blew Up

Making it big in Saudi Arabia

In Saudi Arabia before the days of Khomenis religious
revolution in the Middle East the indigent Western Hemisphere
part of the work force occupied a lot of their free time by
either looking for spirits or engaged in distilling them.
I arrived there in the spring of l976 and inside of a
month was approached by my supervisor and asked if I would
like to make $50 a week extra. He took me over to where he
was living temporarily and explained that he was house
sitting for two people who were on vacation in the U.S. He
gave me a tour of the place and then escorted me out back to
a tin shed. Inside the tin shed was a full blown alcohol
stil just a cooking away. There were two 375 gallon vats
for fermenting beer and two 30 gallon pots sitting on eight
electric burners. The pots were connected at their lower end
through a series of hoses switches and pumps to the vats, and
at the upper end to two condensers mounted in window boxes
and fans.
The pots were a large aluminum type that could be purchased
at the Suk but were modified and shaped so that a pressure
cooker with its bottom cut out could be welded to the top of
the pot after it was modified with an aluminum sheet metal
cone, the bottom of which was welded to the mouth of the pot
while the smaller end of the cone accomodated the reduced
size of the pressure cooker. Protruding from the pots were
two thermometers, indicating the temperatures of the interior
brew.

Besides the pungent smell this was the scene that
greeted me as I walked into the tin shed. My supervisor,
Butch, never gave me a clue as to how I was to earn the $50.
To me, it was a total surprise, and I was overwhelmed to
learn that alcohol was being made in a country whose laws
strictly forbid its use. Thus began my career as a
bootlegger in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
My duties for my weekly fifty involved fetching and
carrying and mixing for Butch. Each week the fermenting vats
had to be refilled with 375 gallons of water, 250 lbs of
sugar and five quart tins of bakers yeast and a tin of Calgon
water softener. The mixing was done with a nondescript 2 x 4.
Over the subsequent 18 months I would come to know that long
board well; I earned that weekly fifty. During the course of
my working for Butch I inquired as to what exactly he was
getting out of keeping the stil going for the absentee
residents. Surprisingly he did not hesitate in telling me.
"Around $10,000" he replied
I lost my breath for a second. "Ten thousand dollars U.S"?
That's the monthly take off this stil after expenses Butch
told me.
"And you are only paying me $50 a week for doing all of the
heavy work? I asked.
"It is you", Butch said, "who should be paying me for
introducing you to the opportunity" I was getting smart
fast. Six months later the owners of that stil left for the
States permanently, with their profits from making and
selling alcohol from that stil for the past ten years.
Millionaires. I purchased half of their stil at that time
for $5000 cash. I received one fiberglass fermenting vat, a
pump and hoses and valves, a fan and windowbox and the
condenser which was explained to me was a radiator from a 57
chevy because that particular year Chevy had used silver-
solder and not lead solder. I also got one of the 30 gallon
pots and my old friend the well-used and blackened, sugar-
encrusted 2x4. It was worth it. I had purchased a proven stil
which I had already a month of experience on. I was in
business.
During my initial tenure with the 2x4 I was situated in
temporary quarters and was on the waiting list for quarters.
Each week the new-hires looking for permanent quarters would
board a bus and be ushered around to the available housing. I
knew what I wanted and fortunately had the patience to wait
for it. There was a section of Jeddah that was primarily
built for the original TWA employees that arrived in 1945 to
help Old King Saud set up an airline with the DC3 that FDR
had given him on a State Visit. The housing was in various
states of dilapidation by my arrival in l976, but ideal for
making booze. Each villa had two bedrooms and twoa bathrooms and
a garden and patio that was surrounded by an 8 foot wall with
a double gate entry large enough to drive my suzuki jeep
through. The garden had banana palms and numerous oleander
bushes which seemed to be in a constant state of full bloom.
It was paradise. I bought an African Gray Parrot to live in
the banana tree to celebrate moving in. Thank god those ahead
of me on the list didn't want it when it came available.
Obviously no bootleggers in that group.
I set the big vat and the pot up in the spare bedroom
which had a large double window opening to the garden just
inside the gate. Perfect for off loading the sugar right out
of the jeep. I got the original rig set up and had canned the
first and second run before even purchasing any furniture for
the place.

The making of alcohol in Saudi Arabia was a rather hit
and miss affair for a number of years and there were many
incidences of westeners setting their houses on fire or
blowing up their stils or poisining themselves before the
Aramco Chemical Engineers finally outlined the four stages
and procedures necessary for making drinking alcohol from,
what was essentially, by Kentucky standards, a portable stil.
The procedure was published and passed around clandensingly
within the western community and it was known as the "Blue
Flame" It was the Saudi bootleggers recipe book for making
Sidiki. It is time to introduce the reader to some of the
specific terminology that was used (and probably still is) in
the alcohol business in Saudi Arabia. Sidiki is an arabic
word for friend and was applied to the specific alcohol that
was being distilled by westerners from sugar and brewers
yeast in the Kingdom. To be "cooking" was interpreted as
brewing sidiki. There was "brown" and "white" sidiki. Brown
sidiki was made by the early brewers from chipped up whiskey
barrels brought from the States. The alcohol was soaked in
the barrel chips in an attempt to flavor it and it eventually
took on a brown tinge. White Sidiki was exactly that,
straight from the fourth run cooking pot and barrelled in a 5
gallon plastic jury can at the wholesale stage.
Normally alcohol is distilled by boiling the fermented
mixture (beer) and tapping it off from the top of a very high
stack. Only the alcohol rises to the very top of the stack.
At lower levels can be tapped lower qualties of the brew. A
large stack for a bootlegger is impractible because of its
visibility so another means had to be devised that
brewed a quality end product without the stack. That method
was a procedure where the brew is cooked four different times
at subsequently lower tempratures, thus simulating the stack.
The first run as it is called is cooked until the thermometer
reaches a certain temprature, the drippings from that cook,
which usually jtook about 6 hours was then recycled into the
vat after it was emptied of waste and cleaned of course, for
the second run. The second run was then cooked untill the
thermometer hit a somewhat lower temprature. I had
accomplished this within the first week land a half of living
in my new villa, but it then became apparent that for an
additional investment in some additional hardware I could use
my initial hardware purchase for the first and second runs
and the smaller pot for the third and fourth runs. I
purchased part of another proven stil the following week and
put the word out that I was in the wholesale sidike business.
In other words I was "cooking", with 220 volt electricity in
this case which was free for the taking if you were willing
to connect up to it while it was hot, which I very carefully
did. The alternative was to call the authorities and explain
to them that the reason you wanted your electricity turned
ff. Having never come up with a good reason and then follow
hrough in person with a straight face I drilled a hole
hrough the wall to the box on the outside by the meter and,
ith rubber gloves pliers and rubber soled shoes hooked it up
after dark by flashlight as a further guard against
detection. I don't mind saying that it was uneventful and the
end product was virtually invisible to passersbye on the
outside of the wall.

Hot dawg! I was cooking. Each week I was filling 6 5 gallon plastic jury cans with 95% alcohol.Cash customers were lined up at the door. Ordinarially they would cut it with bottled water and sell it by the gallon. It depended on the customer. If they were selling to Arabs they would cut it with tap water. The tap water wasn't potable over there but maybe the natives had the necessary bugs to fight dysentery, or maybe the alcohol killed any germs. The stil ran 24/7 and I was pocketing $6000 a month for $400 in expenses. I was getting rich. So rich I started buying $100 a bottle Jonnie Walker Black smuggled in by the Embassy boys. One night while drunk out of my mind and entertaining some potential buyers everything in the room went into slow motion. There were only two rules in making Sadiki and staying in the chips and out of trouble. Don't drink while you're cookin and don't sell to Arabs. I had an Arab friend that I gave an occasional gallon to so I didn't think I was breaking the second rule technically. It was the first rule that sunk my ship. While showing them around the stil I opened the bathroom door and showed them my 3rd run, which was steaming out of the radiator so fast and filling the room so that it burned our eyes. I closed the door without wondering why there was steam coming out of the radiator instead of drips. Ten minutes later my question was answered as the expansion of the gas from the exploding stil sucked out my windows, separated the wall of the add-on in which we were sitting, split door jams as closed doors were blown open and the wall of the bathroom came crashing down. What was really neat was how the dust in the add-on just seemed to go airborne simultaneously. I found my guitar laying out in the yard--with out a scratch on it??

The Saudi cops came knocking on my fence gate. I told them my oven blew up while I was baking unleavened bread. My neighbor and I spent the next few weeks jacking the house back together. I tried to rebuild the wall but it was a cinderblock mess. My girlfriend suggested I put up some 1/8" plywood and plaster over it. Which I did. I removed the shards of remaining glass from the windows and closed the drapes. I cooked for another few weeks but it was never the same. I sold the still for what I paid for it and gave my notice at work.

Before leaving my house had to be inspected by the Housing Authority. That was a hoot. In anticipation of the building inspector I patched the doors back on their frames, moved a large wardrobe infront of the plywood wall, waxed the floors and shook out the rugs, polished the mirrors and wet dusted the entire house. I put on my happiest, glad to see ya, face on for the Inspector.

As he meandered through the house with his clipboard I kept chattering about how I loved the place and spent a lot of time fixing it up despite its dilapidated state when I had moved in. I told him that I had spent a lot of my own money on the house and garden because I fell in love with the villa's old world flavor. He opened the drapes and stared out into the garden. "Those are the cleanest windows I've ever seen" he exclaimed. I use ammonia and newspaper just like my mother taught me, I replied. If there is one thing I am insistant on its sparkling windows, I said. He closed the drapes and headed for the bathroom. The trick here was to get him to turn to his right as he was leaving the bathroom because if he turned to his left he would see that the wall was missing. As I positioned myself slightly aft and to his right I pulled some of the kitchen flat ware out of my pocket. As he was preparing to leave I said. "Look here. My girlfriend even polished the flatware as well as the pots and pans. Naturally he turned to his right to see my polished flatware as he left the bathroom and we walked toward the kitchen. As he moved out of the bathroom I positioned myself in front of the glass from the bathroom door buried in the opposing wall across the hall. I had removed some of it, but I didn't want to make a repair obvious with patches. I wonder to this day what ever happened to the poor man after the next people that moved in complained that the place was an absolute shambles.