I think that I first heard of “The Blue Flame”, (an unofficial and illicit publication dating back to the 1930s) when I was delivering a training course in the Arabian Gulf. It was put together by some of the chemists working at the time at Aramco (later Saudi Aramco), to show their fellow expats how to produce distilled spirits – a controversial activity in Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is illegal.
It has taken me ten years to track down an original version of The Blue Flame. The original real McCoy is essentially an 18-page summary of the 372 pages of “Chemistry and Technology of Wines & Liquors” by Herstein & Gregory, first published in 1935, the same year as most sources think The Blue Flame was first published. This source text was written very shortly after the end of the US’s own disastrous experiment with national alcohol prohibition.
An internet search yields various texts which claim to be transcribed from The Blue Flame, but they all seem to have been produced in the 1970s. The newer internet versions appear to be real, but they contain no part of the original document, and are nowhere near as succinct as the original copy which I have now located.
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My difficulties in obtaining the true Blue Flame were perhaps, it has been suggested to me, because its very existence is still a highly sensitive issue. The Saudi authorities can scarcely have been unaware of its existence, or the existence of the equipment associated with its use, but any tolerance of the illicit distillation of spirits in Saudi Arabia for the use of expats is not something which those authorities would like attention drawn to.
Apparently, a distinction was drawn by the authorities between scale of operation. Production for sale rather than personal use was absolutely not tolerated and, after an engineer was arrested in the 1980s for engaging in wholesale production, Aramco seized as many copies of The Blue Flame as they could find, and strongly encouraged user discretion in future. This was the point at which The Blue Flame became increasingly hard to obtain. The catalyst for this was reportedly not however that the engineer in question was arrested, but that he successfully sued Aramco for condoning illicit alcohol production, citing the existence of The Blue Flame as evidence.
Tolerance of potentially large scale home distillation for personal consumption has reportedly continued to this day. When I posted on LinkedIn that I had a copy of the document, somebody commented: “While in Al Khobar Safeways supermarket I noticed expats with 56 pound bags of sugar and availability of gin, rum and whisky flavouring.” However, this tolerance extended not just to turning a Nelson eye to people’s astonishingly high sugar consumption, but to standard Aramco expat company houses being provided with a small block-reinforced room at the back of the garage with no apparent purpose or door to the inside of the house, but with all necessary utilities to run a still.
One of my ex-Aramco correspondents gave me the official explanation for there being such a room: “Aramcons (as the expats called themselves) were very keen on photography”. Such rooms (known as “Aramco rooms”) were reportedly responsible for an extraordinary number of “lawnmower fires” and “defective water heater explosions”. Having only an outside door and reinforced walls, they contained any such fires and explosions to the room itself, but “several garage doors were blown across the street when vapour ignited”.
It was all quite organized. Each camp had a dedicated stainless steel welder whose job was to fabricate stills. You put your name down on a list, and stills were manufactured to order in a production run. The best stills were however reportedly made in the hangars of Saudi Arabian Airlines by expat aircraft mechanics using stainless steel and silver-soldered copper piping. According to one source, the radiator from a '57 Chevy was prized as a condenser, as it was silver-soldered, but I’d speculate that they used what came to hand. The entire operation was conducted using the skills which the expats brought with them, and company resources.
Making this moonshine, or “siddiqui” (which means “my friend” in Arabic), as it was known, could be big business. When I first started out as a freelance consultant, I had a walk-in city centre office, and a Saudi bootlegger on home leave dropped in to enquire where he could get the cheapest possible bulk supply of potable alcohol, with a view to importing it into Saudi Arabia by fuel tanker load. He was already somewhat inebriated at 10am, so I’m guessing his plan did not go well, if indeed it ever came to fruition. One would imagine that getting caught smuggling 36,000 litres of Indian rum over the Saudi border carries a fairly heavy penalty.
If you’d like to see a copy of the oldest original version of The Blue Flame I could find, it is available here. I had tried to get hold of a copy via that website some years ago, but they were having difficulty, even though the site administrators are the children of the expats who would have used it.
Hi Sean
OK, we’re total strangers(!!!) and never met! An old friend forwarded your article, which brought back many happy memories. You mention the Blue Flame dating back to the 1930’s. OK, possible (I’m not arguing!). I went out to Libya with Occidental in 1975 and was introduced to the “gentle art”. Here it was called “flash” (don’t ask!), and I was presented with a copy of the Blue Flame (I still have it in my library). I was told it was about a 3rd or 4th generation photocopy of the original document which originated in Saudi in the early 1950’s, when the King outlawed the craft. 1930’s? 1950’s? I’m open to either date/period. One thing is certain, as terminal chemist, distillation became fun and profitable! I then spent some time in UK (1981-1991) and then Aramco (DHA then ABQ). The hobby resumed and I went into partnership with a good friend. We kept everything low key, supplying only trusted friends- And through an intermediate, even the son of the police chief in ABQ.- who turned out to be our most supplied customer(!) I never asked, and was never told, other than the transfers took place in a layby on the Dammam- Abqaiq highway. With my share of the profits, I was able to buy a new Land Rover, which I drove home with my wife in 1999! You mention some misfortune a poor hapless soul suffered in the 1980’s. Not long after arriving in DHA, I was puzzled by a seeing a large concrete plinth, that once was the floor of a block of bachelor houses in Mangrove Circle, and was told some guy’s still blew up and it took all the other houses in the block to the Promised Land! I wonder if we are talking about the same guy? Best wishes, Paul
You may be right about timeline, Paul. The clear link to a book from the 30’s means that it cannot be from earlier, but my sources differed on when it was originally written. They had all encountered it first in the 70’s.