State of the Art Alcohol Production

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WITH A LITTLE BIT OF HELP FROM OUR FRIENDS

Luckily, as it turned out, we didn't have to do it all ourselves. As usual, we had help from our readers. Our mail sacks were often bulging with letters from folks with good solid information and suggestions, and we had offers of assistance from a number of people . . . ranging from retired moonshiners to chemical engineers. One of our prime considerations was finding an effective mash formula, and that alone proved to be a herculean task. (Besides experimenting with ground, sprouted, and kernel corn . . . we had to balance the effectiveness of cooking the mash against the energy consumed, ascertain which type of yeast to use, and thoroughly understand the part that enzymes played in the fermentation process.)

Since very few books covered the subject in any kind of detail, we were forced to rely on a trial and error process recording results as we went along in order to figure out which procedures were most effective (hence some of our earlier recipes were elementary . . . and were superseded by more productive formulas). This, after all, is precisely what research is all about, and there necessarily has to be a "ground" point from which to advance.

Of course, a bit of assistance from "them that was doing'"-in this case the Zeithamer family from Alexandria, Minnesota (see MOTHER NO. 59, page 80)helped us a great deal. While we toured his father's farm-based alcohol facility, Alan Z. filled us in on what he had learned about enzyme technology, starch crop use as a source of raw material, still design, and other bits and pieces of information which we eagerly absorbed.

At the same time, we were busily working hand in hand with a group of professionals (one of whom was an engineer from the alcohol industry) who volunteered their services to help us understand the whys and wherefores of distillation. Needless to say, after running off endless batches of test samples (in a transparent glass still that our guests had generously provided) and recording times and temperatures, the picture became a whole lot clearer . . . and we could move on to the real thing: a full-sized build-it yourself home distillery, which we ultimately featured in issue 58, page 76 . . . along with a second solar still (designed and built by MOTHER-reader Jim Langley) for those interested in pursuing the ultra-low-cost benefits that this type of distillation might provide.

NEW DESIGNS

By June of last year, we were really "cookin' ", so to speak. We'd already built several stills using concepts of our own and borrowing principles and ideas from both individuals and industrial manuals-and we finally decided to publish our first original design: MOTHER's 3" packed-column woodburning still. Because it was constructed of common materials (a discarded water heater tank, some conduit, copper tubing, and glass marbles, for the most part!) and because it worked even better than we'd expected (the simple apparatus could turn out as high as 190-proof alcohol at a rate of over 3/4 gallon an hour), we chose to use it together with our ethanol-powered pickup truck as the "star of the show" for the series of demonstrations, seminars, and press conferences we'd planned for the summer and beyond.

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