ALT-7 Alternative Fuel Sources
Build a still. Seriously. Prohibition is over!
The oil and gas companies are doing it, and doing it in such a way that ethanol is an expensive, wasteful, rare commodity. You can do this yourself! Its easier than baking bread or boiling an egg. Okay maybe not as easy as boiling an egg, but on the upside, you don't need any eggs.
Ethanol, being marketed as E85 (actually a gas/ethanol mix) is alcohol. Not the kind you put on a boo boo, or the kind you use to clean things, but the kind you aren't supposed to drink if you are going to be driving.
Isopropyl is for boo-boos. It works fine in the gas tank too, and is actually sold as a water-removing gas treatment. Methyl alcohol is the other kind, also used as a supplement.Both of these are toxic to drink, and difficult and dirty to distill.
Ethanol, however, is as easy and clean as anything you have lurking in your tool shed or in your backyard. You want, say, a couple big containers of about fifty gallon capacity, some water to put in one, and some sugar, from almost any source from pasta to potatoes to beets, or plain white granulated, and some yeast.
You barely need the yeast. You carry enough around with you to inseminate your still just by handling the sugar. The yeast that ferments grape juice to make wine grows naturally on the grapes while on the vine, and more is added by the traditional stomping by traditional feet. You can buy the clean, neat, sanitary stuff at the grocery store in the baked goods section.
The rest is simple do it yourself plumbing. You have your vat or jug or barrel with sugar water and yeast, so you already have the fermentation process underway. It happens naturally, and doesn't even require heat, though warming it will speed the process. The trick here is to capture the vapor emitted by the growing yeast, cooling it so that it condenses, and capturing it, so you can have a nip, or just supplement your gas-huffing grocery-getter.
Most of the time, this just means a coil of copper tubing, to capture the condensate and drop it in your favorite jug. Look around on the Internet, or at your local library and you'll find some interesting contraptions meant to increase purity and proof-age, but you've got the basics already.
There's some finesse involved for drinking the stuff, as there are oily hydrocarbon messes involved at the beginning and end of distilling any given batch, but this is almost entirely to do with flavor and not proof-age. There are details about the speed and purity which may take some tinkering, mostly to do with temperature (hotter distills faster, cooler distills with more purity) and there is some messing around with storage and preservation techniques. As a rule, though, you should be able to pull twenty gallons of burnable alcohol from every pound of sugar, and even more from starch.
Check around to make sure your county or city doesn't have any vestigial prohibition laws, and maybe see about getting these laws overturned for the sake of the earth and the economy.city dwellers and suburbanites might want to check with the neighbors, and maybe consider establishing community distilleries, rather than pack a still into every apartment, though stills have been made small enough to produce a few drams a day sitting on a stove top.
Heres the best alternative fuel of all! Make it yourself. Yeah, alcohol still produces CO2 as waste, but the hydrocarbon emissions are negligible. I know a few guys already running their own stills, and fueling Subarus and VW's and big old Ford trucks, who claim that other than maybe eventually changing the kind of fuel line you use, no modifications are needed at all. Some even claim they get better power and mileage. No way to beat the price, they agree without exception.
Now, a really clever mind could probably sort out a methanol still, and use their own cut grass, raked leaves, weeds, poop, and paper plates to produce clean burning methanol (wood alcohol). For being earth friendly and frugal, you can't beat using human waste product as fuel, but methanol is produced by E-Coli, not yeast, and tends to be a bit stinky, and quite a bit more hazardous to deal with. Check into it, though. Methane waste from farms and paper mills and lumber yards and swamps and sewage facilities can be condensed and burned as fuel too.
If you have a garden or a lawn, the cheapest, cleanest possible fuel alternatives could be quite literally right in your own back yard. Combined with a policy of reducing how much you drive, and what vehicles you use, it might be entirely possible for just about everyone to use only what they can produce for themselves.
Me? I have what used to be an apple barrel, which was handy because it only ever previously contained a ferment-able material. It sits in the sun on the south side of my building, and puts out just enough to keep me rolling.
I don't habitually drink, but I understand that put through a charcoal filter, this is pretty much straight vodka, and not bad at all.
Just remember to put it in the car, not the driver. The driver runs better on water. Passengers maybe could use a dram, but never the driver.
