Renewable Gossip

Making Ethanol Alcohol for Fuel

In the following weeks we will be covering how to make Ethanol Alcohol for fuel.

Anyone can make Ethanol at home but there are some safety precautions you must follow or you can burn down your house or die in an explosion. In most countries it’s also illegal to do without a license. I’m not sure if it’s because the Government is trying to protect you from blowing yourself up or if they just want their tax money, more than likely it’s just the tax money they are afraid of loosing if everybody made there own fuel and booze at home.

Here’s what you will need to create a very small batch for scientific purposes & testing.

Sugar, Yeast & Water + Heat & Time = Alcohol. The amount of time to ferment this mixture can range roughly between 24 hours and two weeks depending on the ingredients you use. There are dozens of different sugars and yeasts that can be used each with it’s own pros and cons.

To extract pure Ethanol from the Sugar and Yeast you will need to distill the fermented product. Distillation is nothing more than heating the mixture to a certain temperature where the Ethanol will become a vapor and then after cooling in another part of your distillation apparatus will become a liquid again.

Ethanol is the active ingredient in almost all of the Alcohol you can purchase in a liquor store but the ethanol we are trying to produce for fuel is a good deal more concentrated.

I’ll be adding more information to this page as time goes by.