No, this isn’t a story about Tom Dwyer being carted off to jail for moonshining. Two years ago, he was looking into the possibility of having our shop do conversions on cars to make them flex-fueled or even totally alcohol-fueled vehicles. Aside from any mechanical questions, the first problem to crop up was obtaining fuel-grade alcohol for testing. The minimum amount available for purchase was a 10,000-gallon railroad tanker car, far beyond anything testing might require. Undeterred, Tom decided that if he needed alcohol he would make it himself.
The first step was obtaining the ATF license necessary to produce fuel grade ethanol. Watching David Blume’s video “Alcohol Can Be a Gas” gave him the basics of alcohol production, and a web search for still producers yielded a local manufacturer. Tom quickly put down a deposit on a 50-gallon model but 18 months later, still with no still, he started making calls. Pieces began trickling in in March, more came in April, and the final shipment arrived in May. Meanwhile, Tom made arrangements with his neighbor, Scott Hanson, to work together to build the system in Scott’s barn. In June, after assembling the pieces, buying gauges to replace the ones that never arrived, and fixing 9 leaks, Tom and Scott were able to step back and look at their creation. Six hundred-gallon barrels (1 cooling tank and 5 fermenting tanks) stood on a rack next to the nine-foot tall still. The equipment itself was ready, but now they needed something to go in it.
The wort for a still (the material to be fermented and distilled) is made up of feedstock (base material like corn or sugar), yeast, and water. The first candidate for the feedstock was tainted high-fructose corn syrup, which is about 70% sugar and an ideal medium for the yeast to ferment. While Tom was considering the corn syrup, a chance contact put him in touch with someone who had 850 pounds of water-damaged “sugar-in-the-raw” he was willing to donate to the project. Employing the “free is good” philosophy, Tom quickly and wisely switched to pure sugar for the test run. With a yield of about 1 gallon of ethanol for every 12 pounds of sugar this was enough to make about 70 gallons of alcohol. Only the yeast remained, but the yeast to create fuel alcohol no ordinary yeast- it’s a special strain bred for high temperature resistance and high alcohol tolerance. While household yeast dies at 6% alcohol and brewer’s can survive about 18%, fuel yeast makes it to 20%. Similarly, while household yeast dies at 80 degrees and brewer’s at 90, fuel yeast can stand temperatures up to 100 degrees. Tom finally found a company that sold fuel yeast and that was willing to sell a small amount to a private individual. Armed with all the basics, he dumped the sugar, yeast, and water (from his own well) into the fermentation tanks where for the next three days Tom’s 3 trillion new “co-workers” went to work.
When the fermentation was complete, the mash (fermented liquid) was pumped from the fermenting tanks into the still. It was then heated to about 200 degrees, which is hot enough to turn the alcohol in the mash to steam while leaving behind the water and solids. The alcohol steam rose into the 9′ tall tube of the still’s column, where it condensed back into a liquid and drained into the cooling tank. A still with a 3″ diameter column like Tom’s can produce about 2 gallons of 90%-pure alcohol per hour. (Back in the day, the old moonshine stills produced alcohol that was about 70% pure. They would put the alcohol through the still again to make it stronger, and would put an “X” on the jug for each time it went through. This explains the “XXXX” on the jugs of cartoon moonshiners- the shine had been distilled 4 times!)
Drops began falling from the column, the drops became a dribble, and the dribble soon turned into a stream of crystal clear, 190-proof, independently produced replacement for fossil fuel. Tom brought a sample to the shop for show-and-tell, where one of our less intelligent employees tried a drop on his tongue. “I was numb for 10 minutes”, he sputtered. “I can see how this stuff can power a car!” Tom’s first run wasn’t cheap (he had waited more than 2 years and paid over $750 per gallon for his initial fill-up), but he had proven that the concept worked. When the bugs are completely worked out, this home-brewed fuel will be a reliable and inexpensive fuel source for the Tom Dwyer fleet. “This will let us run our Courtesy Shuttles on pure alcohol instead of the E85 (15% gas, 85% alcohol) they currently use. It won’t make a dent in the country’s gas prices, but it’s inexpensive, comes from renewable stock, is almost totally clean for the environment, and doesn’t depend on a huge conglomerate for production and transport,” Tom said. “It’s a small step, but each small step makes a difference.” Drops become dribbles become streams…
