Peak Wine

[sleepybubble]

have run a search under Bio-ethanol and ethanol I am getting few returns from this board. Does anybody here have any experiences of distilling home brew alchohol to produce ethanol for blending with petrol.
I ask as my father has offered me a laboratory still, with a throughput of about 8 litres an hour. I make all the wine we drink in our house (A LOT!), mostly from our own fruit and as we move into the new house and build a 90x30ft poly tunnel to ramp up our soft fruit productions in the next year I have been toying with the idea of diverting some of the wine produced to be converted to methanol.
At the moment both of our vehicles are diesel based (one van for my work and a landy for the croft and my missus)  We need to keep the landy for stuff around the croft, and I need to keep the van for work, but I'm thinking of getting a 1.0l ish petrol car for the shopping/school runs etc. and running it on blended petrol/methanol, as the landy is not cost effective in this role.
Whilst there is an abundance of information to be 'bought' on this subject in the forms of e-books I'm always wary of snake oils!
I'd prefer to hear from people who have direct experience.
The whole subject of bioethanol obviously has wider political ramifications which I'd prefer to avoid in this discussion. I know some folk here are very anti using food for fuel, however I am not the US'ofA just one person. So please dont come down on me too hard.
At current peak production levels we currently produce about 60 litres of wine at roughly 9% alchohol in 3 week cycles for about a three month production season. When the fruit from the polytunnel kicks in next year I expect to be able to triple that output. So I could be playing with about 180 litres of wine for fuel experimentation next summer. Working by the numbers and allowing for losses I might get about 16 litres of methanol and a lot of strawberry juice concentrate by distilling. This seems like a crappy yield to me.... obviously I could be selling the 180 litres of strawberry wine if I had a license and making a few quid a bottle but how much diesel is that going to buy me next summer, proberbly about 90 litres the way prices are rising.
However when the acre of Black current and yostaberry bushes come on stream, I'm going to have more fruit than we can cope with. (Read Drink!) and whilst jamming is fun, I don't even eat breakfast.
I know I could switch to a more intensive yielding crop for the alchohol however I choose the fruit wine as we will proberbly be making it anyways and wont be able to sell it (Legally!) I will have a still, and the alternative is making unlicensed brandy and I think I might go blind by next winter!

Obviously the prime soft fruit is actually going to be sold at the farmers market in town, but there will be a lot of spoilt/mishappen/blemished fruit that we tend to use for wines and jams etc.
Has anybody here had any real experience of doing anything like this, is it even worth trying, am I really right about the input output volumes? Maths has never been my strong suit.

All thoughts welcome.

Mark

[dhaslam]

It is a distillation process and obviously needs quite a lot of energy. Solar powered stills perhaps.  Part of the fun was dodging the police.   Traditionally made on islands so that escape was possible   but usually at the expense of the equipment. 

www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Article/785117

[Woodenstop]

Don't ask why I've got these links 
http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/Vineyard/3281/moonshine.html
http://encode.com/exec/ndistilling.htm
http://www.moonshine-still.com/page2.htm
http://alternative-energy-biofuels-swicki.eurekster.com/alcohol+still+designs/
http://www.stillcooker.com/index.html

Andy

[sleepybubble]

hmm.... yes maybe I can see why nobody would be jumping forward to shout out that they are distilling alchohol at home 
Maybe I should be asking my question on a more theoretical basis eh.....
Some good links to still plans, but as I have access to a still already I dont need to build one, I was mostly curious if my ballpark calculations on throughputs were accurate or not....
Maybe I should just quietly experiment on my own with this one. If anybody was following this thread and had considered the other use for a still which would be to turn lower grade alchohol into higher grade alchhol for human consumption then I theoretically reccomend freeze distilling.

[KenB]

Sleepy,

I have Italian neighbours, who not only grow a few of their own grapes, but each year import 1200kg (yes 1.2 tonnes) of grapes from Italy in order to make the wine for the whole extended family. I believe that makes about 1200 bottles that they share between them - an ideal family co-operation.

I have tried their wine, and it is better than any that could be had from a shop.   



Ken

[Ian]

Your numbers are about right (see later for more info). If you are serious about maximising your ETHANOL yield, then start using high alcohol tolerance yeasts (like a Sauternes yeast) which should get you to about 14% or more alcohol.

However, to get high alcohol levels, you need high sugar levels to start with and UK grown soft fruit will not be enough on its own - you will need to add sugar.

So why not cut out the "fruit" bit (as you will not be using it after distillation) and just ferment sugar or other starch crops like potatoes or grains ?

Alcohol mixes with water very easily and although they have different boiling points, the alcohol does not come off cleanly in a still. the bottom line is that the VERY BEST alcohol concentration you can achieve from distillation is 96% alcohol and 4% water. 5% of the alcohol is methanol and this CAN be collected as it is the very first portion that comes off the vapours.

4% water in the distillate is probably a no-no for fuel use. Maybe if you mixed it with petrol or diesel the water would just drop out but I do not know - I have not tried it.

Many years ago I used to collect alcohol from a kitchen still but the results were not very satisfactory in an olfactory sense; most of the distillate was used to clean the floors and remove stubborn marks from lino, degrease the car engine bay, etc.

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Ian

[mespilus]

Yes getting the last 4% water out of the ethanol is impossible by distilling,
and expensive with noxious chemicals that are of little importance when the end use is a petrol substitute.

Unless you have a flexfuel vehicle you are unlikely to be able to run on ethanol rich mixtures anyway,
as the specific energy of ethanol is significantly lower than fossil fuels requiring larger volumes of fuel to be injected per cycle.

The azeotropic mixture of water and ethanol boils at 78.1C.

If you were to distill a fermented liquid remember, to avoid madness, blindness and death from methanol poisoning,
the fraction that boils off at a lower temperature is the noxious methanol.Also commercial vodkas, for example, proclaim 'Triple Distilled'.

This is not an act of altruism from the distillers but a requirement to remover all the methanol.

Would sunflowers for sunflower oil be a possibility?

[sleepybubble]

OK now I'm getting serious answers, Yes agreed using higher yield yeasts is possible as is double fermenting. The byproduct (must) can actually be fed to pigs....
I do tend to add some sugar to my strawberry wine recipe anyways, lat years batch did suffer from secondary fermentation in the bottle though as it was a bit too sweet. I ended up with a very wet and sticky shed after a small accident about two months ago. 50 bottles of naturally carbonated wine falling off a high shelf sure makes a big bang.
I agree with the principle of using potatoes or grain or just plain sugar however we will have excess fruit, after market sales and our own wine and jam usage, which will not be saleable. Perhaps I might not be running a car off the quantities that I'm producing after all, but it might do for the chainsaw or Jenny.
From what I had read so far when blending ethanol with a small percentage water content with petrol then the water separates out after standing. I might be wrong I'm no chemist. I might do a bit of an experiment with some petrol and water tomorrow to see if that works or not.

Again sunflowers are a good idea, but a bit heavy on mechanical processes for fuel extraction,(but I haven't really read up on that so I will give it a whizz) and I am not convinced they would cope with the climate too great up here . Plus they are a bit too monocrop'ish. With fruit bushes we can interplant, and they are proven in the northern Scottish climate.

With regards flexfuel vehicles and ethanol rich mixtures, I have found it hard to find any really definitive answers on this subject across the net. Obviously manufacturers state that only flexfuel cars can take ethanol, however there does seem to be a variety of methods for converting an existing vehicle, ranging from manual timing advancement through to chip upgrades on electronically managed engines. I may be confused but I swear I read on one website that somebody was using up to 50% home blended ethanol without any apparent side effects on an unconverted vehicle. ( I really ought to do more bookmarking so I can reference stuff better)
Its a bit like the early days of biodiesel when myths abounded about how much of what you could or couldn't put into a car and what it might do to it.

Thanks all for input, especially the fuel related stuff....

[renewablejohn]

I would recommend pea pods and sugar beet be added to the list of brews. (pea pod wine= poor mans whisky 

[Ian]

I think I was a little unclear about water in the fuel...

If you add water to petrol, IT WILL drop out (instantly) as water is polar and petrol is not.

What I do not know is what happens to a water/alcohol solution when you add it to petrol. Petrol is non polar and water is polar, but alcohol is a bit like a detergent and can act as a solvent for polar and non polar materials.

What I SUSPECT will happen is that the petrol and alcohol/water mixture will turn somewhat cloudy with the water held in suspension within the bulk liquid. I also suspect that over a period of time, the water will drop out but this could be seconds or months or years, I do not know.

It will also depend upon the amount of "wet" alcohol that is added to the petrol..... It looks like you have some experimenting to do....

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Ian

[sleepybubble]

Ian,

Thanks I think I am going to have to brush the dust off my O'Level chemistry books and learn some proper terminiology. Wracking my brains and thinking back 20 years whilst I was watching birds in a nest on a classroom windowsill other kids might have been playing with centrifuge's for seperating liquids. I guess I do have some experimenting to do, at least this time nobody will be grading my work!

John,

Everybody raves about pea pod wine and I am yet to make any, The three year old elderberry we have is something out of this world though! I highly reccomend rhubarb as well for a high turnaround, its drinkable straight out of the bin and can be made in huge quantities, particularly good once you have done crumbles to death around this time of year. It really compliments fish well, which are also abundent at this time of year.

Thanks again all.... I think I might do some small scale experiments to get some ethanol out of one bottle of wine so I have something to play with in terms of seperation.

[Ivan]

I don't think you need to bother with any fruit. Just buy cheap sugar, add to water with appropriate nutrients for yeast and ferment that. From my schooldays recollection of wine making, you are not going to find a yeast that goes much more than 23% alcohol, so you'll need a cheap/free source of low quality fuel to heat the mixture for distillation (or use solar still - navitron vacuum tubes would work well!)


Ivan