Home Distiller

Can I test with equipment to see that there is no sugar left in the "mash" With healthy yeast I want my time and money to be 20% for fuel distilling and no wasted sugar.. I am getting 50 lbs for under $20.. They have something to test sugar content in fruit,would this be what I want to buy?

To get to 20% you will need approx 3.2 lbs of sugar per gallon!

You can measure the presents of remaining sugar several ways...an sg hydrometer beginning and ending reading is the easiest.

Find yeast that will go to 20% is possible, but hard to get all the conditions right to make it happen.

DAD300 wrote:To get to 20% you will need approx 3.2 lbs of sugar per gallon!

You can measure the presents of remaining sugar several ways...an sg hydrometer beginning and ending reading is the easiest.

Find yeast that will go to 20% is possible, but hard to get all the conditions right to make it happen.

Or


You could just taste it..

Going by the calculator on the parent site.

Mixing 50 pounds of sugar with 13.9 gallons of water will yield a wash of a total volume of 17.6 gallons with a starting SG of 1.13 that will ferment out to exactly 20%. After fermentation, your SG should be .975

That's all if you can get a 20% wash to finish out.

$20 for 50 lbs of sugar. $5 for yeast and nutrients. Will give you 17 gal of 20%.
17 gal of 20% wash will give you 3.4 gal of 100% alcohol. If you could collect all of it.
$25 divided by 3.4 gal is $7.35 per gal.

Not to mention fuel to run the still. And labor time.

Will cost you more per gallon then gas at the pump. Unless you get the sugar free. It's no worth it for fuel.

What Prariepiss said...

Unless you get free fermentables, and keep a yeast culture going, and have a free source of any other required nutrients, and have a free or cheap source of heat, you can't make ethanol cheaper than you can buy it... We've had this discussion many times here in these forums yet people still think it is a viable option at the personal level... It would be a full time job to make enough ethanol or drive back and forth to your full time job... Time is money and that also has to factored into the mix...

Do some math and let us know if you think it's still worthwhile... We've done the math and it's not... As for being "Green" or "Eco-Friendly", that is also an epic fail...

I use solar panel electricity to distill so thats free,,apples are giving me some free ethanol and methanol but yields are low,,sugar runs good,,I run a bubbler and aminos with sugar and am growing tons of yeast,got pounds from a few jars but do not clean it up,its only for fuel..

Prairiepiss wrote:That's all if you can get a 20% wash to finish out.

I was of course, going under the assumption that he had yeast that can tolerate 20% alcohol.

bluejay wrote:I use solar panel electricity to distill so thats free,,apples are giving me some free ethanol and methanol but yields are low,,sugar runs good,,I run a bubbler and aminos with sugar and am growing tons of yeast,got pounds from a few jars but do not clean it up,its only for fuel..

Solar panel electricity? Not sure how you would consider that free. Ware and tare on the equipment ain't cheap. Hell I can't even afford the 1500 watt inverter I want. Let alone the panels, batteries, and charge controllers I want. And that still wouldn't be enough to run a still with.

To me going green is about conserving energy. Not wasting it.

Mazriam wrote:

Prairiepiss wrote:That's all if you can get a 20% wash to finish out.

I was of course, going under the assumption that he had yeast that can tolerate 20% alcohol.

Even if he had a 20% tolerant yeast? That doesn't guarantee it will finish.

Better of doing 2X the wash at 10% in the end will be better. Strip both the 10% washes and then do a spirit run on them all at once to make cuts better.

As said above %20 may not finish and if it does, will not taste good.

Edit: Dooh just realized this is the fuel.... part. I would say 14% about as high as I would go assuming the right yeast and nutrients to get it to ferment clean
One thing to think of though will take much longer to ferment a higher % alcohol wash.. can take 3x as long as a 8-10% wash.. So if time is critical to you..... might still be worth lower % washs. The 14% wash I did for a cleaning run took 2x the ferment time as the 8-10% washes I normally do

B

Time wasn't a factor...he has had over three years!

Agree that Ethanol fuel is a waste of time. The conditions in which it's produced for E20 etc refined to an absolute tee. Every single bit of energy potentially lost in the distilling system is either put back into the system or made use of. They have thermodynamics, physics, chemical engineering experts on site daily in order to make these distilleries work optimally, and ship it by the trainload.

If you want fuel ethanol, buy it denatured in large volumes.

The reason Industrial Ethanol is so cheap, is that it is a byproduct of oil/natural gas refining. They simply oxidize ethane gas with N2O (Laughing gas) and get industrial Ethanol. There was a huge stink in Russia two or three years ago when the public found out that the vodka being sold in state stores was not from a fermented starting stock, it all came from a gas wells. Good Night Nurse! I would be very upset as well. That's when it came out that the "New Russia" didn't have a ban on home-distillation, so the up turn in homemade vodka was dramatic.