I quit. Do you like moonshine?

 

LOL... that's funny..

I love it when the moon shines!

While I do drink on occasion, I've never had moonshine.. Drinking ethanol straight from a back yard still would be new to me..

Do you make that stuff?

 

:moon: shine is illegal. If you dont know who makes it you could get wood alcohol and go blind. I did and im typing in brail.

 

I was told you can get a permit to make your own drinking alcohol.. who said its illegal?

I was under the impression that the only real important thing in the making of drinking alcohol was the materials the still was made of.. IE: Copper, silver and stainless ok, iron, aluminum, nickle, tin and stuff like that are bad. (for drinking alcohol but I don't see why it would matter for fuel).

Am I mistaken? If your still is constructed right and you use regular materials in the mash, how could it get poisoned? (No consideration for taste here)

Unless some idiot sells you methanol..

I was also the understanding that some methanol is produced during the distillation for drinking alcohol but the amounts were extremely tiny.

 

Beer or ale is the only micro brewery allowed. Permits vary by state and some in quantities of only up to 400 gallons. Moonshine has never been legal and probably will not. My family has been making peach, strawberry, straight up and all sorts of variteties for 100 years plus back. My last name, famous in the prohibition days with Canada. Without explaining the whole process, you start with grain or any combo to start the mash. During the fermentation process any contamination from a bug to a blown in blade of grass will turn your moonshine into wood alcohol. = Methanol, Only since the early start of the industrial age was methanol discovered it could be created from the uses of natural gas (decomposing biological products) If you have 10 gallons of mash contaminated you now have 10 gallons of methanol, give or take its potency with water, but that is why many people went blind or died in the good ol days. Copper was preferred and still is due to its heat conduction and disbursment characteristics. And finally your last statement was the methanol is produced during distillation...ohhh who told you that? If methanol is produced, distillation increases its purity. It has a lower evaporation temp therefore it rises to the top and condenses while the water falls out lower in the cooling tower. Dead mans drink.

 

Lets be very clear about something.. The amount of knowledge I have about this is very limited to say the least.. It's a funny thing because I am an industrial process engineer.. (almost 20 years) and distillation is just another process that would be right up my alley. But I'm not much interested in that yet.. Not enough E85 cars on the road for it to be practical for me to get into.

But, I thought copper was the prefered material because of something to do with taste.. Apparantly the taste of the copper or some other process involving the copper was at work.

Now for a little chemistry.

Mash produces ethanol.. but you say one blade of grass and you get methanol. Oh boy.. Can you tell me why this happens? how can 1 blade of grass produce a pot full of methanol?
And on that note, what is it about the blade of grass that is so different from a grain like corn? They are both plants with various degrees of sugar.

Why does the yeast (is it yeast?) produce ethanol from grain but methanol from a grass or a bug?

I'm having a problem connecting the dots on this one but one thing does make sense.. When I hear stories about people getting methanol poisoning, I think, "how stupid do you have to be to drink a bottle of methanol".. But now its making more sense.. They don't think they are drinking methanol.. they made it by accident eh?

 

It has to do with the compound makeup of the biological. Its way above me as far as the molecule chain. A blade of grass is my exaggeration. A bug or plant matter has just the right make up to ruin a batch. The yeast interacts with the sugers of the grain to ferment. Much like grapes ferments upon itself with it natural sugars you wont make leaf wine, or stalk wine. The grapes are just themselves nothing else as far as the plant material. As far as pure ethanol, moonshine is way below that. Most of us dont have the molecular seive (filter) to make 99.99 percent ethanol. We just drink the trash ethanol. Now for some reason screwing up you shine that creates the methanol is not so hard.

As far as copper well let me tell you about the others. Remember your working with alot of moisture and water.
Brass heated changes its chemical makeup and will trash your brain somehow.
Steel rusts. Stainless is expensive. Aluminum corrodes with water and is linked to alzheimers. Tin causes scurvey. Iron rusts, Silver expensive, Nickle heavy and brittle. So copper it is.

As far as e-85 cars, you know that bologna. Most vehicles today can run on them with out any issue. Arizona mandates ethanol and methanol mixtures in the summer and winter. That why we have price spikes. The shut down supplies to clean tanks for the other mixture.