My Grandpa made ethanol. Technorati Profile

Grandpa built a distillery in the basement of his farmhouse during the first energy crises in the 1970s. After more than five years of tinkering he entered his design into the 1980 Calif. Dept of Agriculture‘s Alcohol Fuel Plant Design Competition. He didn’t win, but his work was mentioned in all the publications of the day.

Even though it was illegal in Canada, Grandpa kept his still in good working order for twenty years. That’s how he powered his car all through the nineteen eighties and nineties. After adjusting the carburetor to allow more oxygen into its V8 engine and swapping out the rubber hoses, Grandpa burned a clean fuel that gave almost no emissions. And his basement distillery reduced his fuel bill to little more than time and labour.

Once a month the old man would 'borrow' a pail full of dried corn from his neighbor’s feed barn. There were no rollers or mashers in Grandpa’s ethanol plant, he did the smashing himself in a depression in the stone floor. His preparation wasn’t much more evolved than the ancient Incans’.

Grandpa added brewer’s yeast (saccharomyces cerevisiae) to the mash and let it settle in white plastic pails that employed these funky rubber valves to vent the carbon dioxide. When the mixture was ripe, Grandpa distilled it.

Grandpa’s distillation apparatus was a tinker’s masterpiece. He’d fashioned an airtight mash cooker out of a huge copper kettle that was nearly the same size as the old camp stove upon which it sat. When he brought the corn mash to a boil, it yielded alcohol rich vapour as steam. This gas collected in a series of copper condensing tubes above. Each coil ended in a metal reservoir which was subsequently boiled again. At the very back of the distillery, on the end of line, Grandpa used a strange device he called a ‘molecular sieve’ to get pure alcohol from the 96% alcohol / water distillate.

Then there were some mysterious additives, which I can't remember, and the mixture of ethanol to gasoline was about 5:1. Each bucket of corn made about two gallons of ethanol. 

Before he passed away in 1994, Grandpa told me that ethanol was going to be ‘the next big thing’ and that very soon everyone would burn corn gas in their cars and even use it to heat their homes. I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime, but now, almost ten years later I can see he was right. Ethanol refineries are popping up all over Canada, and the smartest and best managed firm appears to be GreenField Ethanol http://www.greenfieldethanol.com