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Renewburbia
Saturday, July 7, 2012 Blog Archive
2013 (1) 2012 (4) July (4)

How to Make Ethanol

Materials Large Juice Bottle Funnel Sugar Water Y east Pressure Cooker Water Bottle Plastic Fish Tank Tube Pots (2) Duct Tape Steps 1. Prepare the sugar-water-yeast solution. Pour a 1/2 C of sugar in the juice bottle. Pour enough warm/hot water from the tap until a quarter full. Shake until all of the sugar is dissolved. Add the sugar and water two more times. Add two packets of yeast. Shake until the yeast is mostly dissolved; Large particles of yeast may still float around.

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2. Let the solution sit for two weeks. Open the top until you hear the bottle release pressure, which is the carbon dioxide escaping. Put in a warm and controlled environment, at least 75F . I put my batch in a trash bin covered by a reusable bag; It absorbs the smell while still allowing air to escape. The solution should be clear and yellow when it's ready to be distilled. It should produce a lot of bubbles during the first days of fermenting; if it's not bubbling, the yeast may not have reacted.

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3. Connect fish tank tube to pressure cooker. Cut a triangular wedge in the tube. Insert the tube into the pressure cooker spout. Wrap with duct tape.

4. Distill methanol from the solution. When the solution ferments, it produces three liquids: methanol, ethanol, and water. The methanol has the lowest boiling point, and water has the highest boiling point. Heat the solution in the cooker on medium high. Place other end of fish tank tube in a pot. Once a bottle cap full of liquid (the methanol) has been distilled put the tube in the water bottle and wrap with duct tape.

5. Distill ethanol from the solution. Reduce heat to medium low . Fill a pot with tap water; this acts as a condenser for the ethanol. Occasionally dunk the fish tank tube in the water. If the condenser was set up properly, gravity would move the condensed liquid down the tube.

Products Ethanol: If the previous steps happened to work, the liquid should have a nice blue flame when lit. I stopped the experiment half-way to test the ethanol. After I had distilled more liquid, it didn't burn. This is because the setup began to distill the water; the liquid needs a high alcohol concentration in order to burn. This may be why my methanol solution from a previous post did not burn, not because of water but due to other impurities.

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Posted by karlh at 6:06 AM

+3 Recommend this on Google

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