EPISODE-755- STEVEN HARRIS ON MAKING ALCOHOL BASED FUELS AT HOME

[Hootie]

The Survival Podcast http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com

SERIES:      TSP
EPISODE:      755
DATE:      October 4, 2011
TITLE:      STEVEN HARRIS ON MAKING ALCOHOL BASED FUELS AT HOME

SOURCE FILE:
http://www.survivalpodcast.net/audio/2011/10-11/epi-00755-steven-harris-on-alcohol-fuels.mp3

FILE ARCHIVE:   
http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/steven-harris-on-making-alcohol-based-fuels-at-home


DESCRIPTION:
Did you know that you can legally and inexpensively make your own alcohol based fuels at home. Today Steven Harris joins us to discuss doing just that!
We start off with the easiest method by using sugar and move onto ways to cut the cost to almost nothing such as getting left over bread, cola syrup, old doughnuts, etc as feed sources for your yeast.
Steven is also giving away five free copies of Alcohol Can Be A Gas by David Blume which the absolute bible on making your own alcohol based fuels. You can enter that contest at IMakeMyOwnGas.com
Making alcohol based fuels is actually very easy and in fact Steven describes it as the “second oldest profession known to man”. If anchorite Sumerians could make beer from spoiled barley gruel surly anyone can learn to basically do the same thing today.

Join Us Today As We Discuss…

• What exactly is alcohol based fuel made up of
• Can it be run safely in modern engines
• What are the best sources of material for making your own alcohol fuels
• How can you make your own fuel tomorrow in your own home with less than a 250 dollar start cost
• What is the difference between ethanol and methanol
• The good, bad and ugly of using corn as a fuel stock
• A laundry list of just about everything that you can use to make alcohol fuels with
• How to get a free permit for making alcohol fuel
• How you could make your own consumable alcohol if the SHTF – currently illegal
• The stuff a brewer has to worry about that a fuel maker can totally ignore

<intro/housekeeping 0:00 - 5:40>

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<5:40>
Jack Spirko: With that, we have the house keeping wrapped up.  It is my great pleasure introduce, again one of our most popular guests of all time Mr Steven Harris. Hey Steven, welcome to The Survival Podcast yet again.

Steven Harris: Jack I am thrilled be here. I just love your show, love your audience and I got so many of my people who've told me that they have just fallen in love with your show, and listen to it everyday now.

Jack Spirko: I  appreciate that and I appreciate you coming back we really probably more feedback from your episodes then just about anybody else that has been on the show. Your defiantly a top 5 all time, as far as audience embracement. I think it is because you bring us real stuff that we can actually do. I think that is a big part of people listening to the TSP for, is not just how to think or whats going on out there but what they can actually do in there own lives. So today you are hear to talk to us about making alcohol fuels. Leading off here, is it a reasonable thing for the lone person sitting in there house to think that they can actually make a difference in there fuel requirements doing this?

<6:46>

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<6:46>

Steven Harris: Yeah, as my friend David Blum the author of book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas" says, "Making alcohol is so old it is the second oldest profession in the world"

Jack Spirko: <Laughs> I guess next to prostitution.

Steven Harris: Prostitution would be the first oldest profession in the world and making alcohol would be the second oldest profession. This goes back to 8000 years ago of the times of the Egyptians, of making basic beers. Making alcohol fuel is pretty straight forward. Basically you can do it 2 ways. You take starch based products such as corn, wheat, rye, or barley. You mix it with an enzyme which in this case would be malted barley and that converts the starches over to sugars, which is our goal. You ferment the sugars and you make alcohol. Of course we can cheat all that in the modern world by taking sugar and adding yeast, I mean get Red Star® baking yeast, in a 5 gallon container. It will make a 14% solution of ethanol alcohol. Or you can use molasses, which you can by on the surplus market. You can get Coke syrup surplus which is flushed down the drain in many bottling plants. Is a great source of sugar, that is not good for us, but the yeast just love it. They turn it into alcohol. There are a whole other variety of source that I'll get into with you, that are free sources for getting feed stock. That you can make all the alcohol fuel that you could possibly want.

<8:29>

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<8:29>

Jack Spirko: You are just making me think. As a brewer we often use corn sugar, in powered form, for carbonation because it ferments quickly and cleanly. We might even do a all malt beer that we are very proud of and still a lot of us will use a half a cup of corn sugar at bottling time. That is very cheap as well. We can get into the in's and out's of whether corn make since for bio fuels in a bit. There are tons of soars of cheap sugar out there. If you have cheap sugar, with a little bit of enzymes added to make sure the yeast are healthy and get done with what there doing. Fermentation is as simple as letting things happen. As a brewer there is a whole plethora of things we were talking about off line, that I have to worry about. If you are going to make this stuff to dump into a car you don't really care.

<9:13>

Steven Harris: You got to worry about your bucket being perfectly sanitized and not being open to air for too long, because there is yeast in the air. Those yeast will get into your bucket. They'll compete with your alcohol producing yeast and they'll through off your flavor. You got to be a the right temperature. We don't care, we through in starch, we heat it up, we throw in the enzyme, we get our sugars, we cool it down, we throw in the yeast, close up the bucket, put a fermentation lock on it, and let it start bubbling. Whether there is some bad yeast in there, it doesn't matter because we going to distill the whole... We are not going to drink the wash. That is called the wash. We're not going to drink the wash, but we are going to distill the wash and get the alcohol out of it. No matter what you read about rums and vodkas and all the other stuff. Everything distilled is vodka. whisky, rum, bourbon, are nothing but vodka but into chard barrels for many years. Between 3 and 9 years. They get their color and there flavor from the chard wood, in the generally oak barrels.

<10:28>

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<10:28>

Jack Spirko: It is really an interesting process how that works. They put these things in these great big chard barrels as temperature changes the alcohol and the vodka if you want to call it, the alcohol beverage is forces into the pores of the wood and back out, many many times over that aging period. The type of oak the source grain. Jack Daniels is a sour mash. Which means they take some sour, 3% of the old mash and add it to the new mash. There are all these different that create the different flavors. In the end the process is fermented gain, into alcohol and it is always the same. It is just what you do with it during and after the process that changes its flavor and nuance.

<11:11>

Steven Harris: Correct. Everything being distilled is going to be basically pure alcohol. which is going to be generically termed as vodka. There are more details we what we call the heads and the tails, what comes out first what comes out of the middle and what last. For the purpose of making a whisky or a vodka to drink your concerned with that is coming out first, which you through away. If you are making an alcohol fuel you are not concerned with what comes out first, middle, and last because it all burns.

Jack Spirko: Correct. You mentioned 14% and there some distillers yeast that your can get from midwest supply, that will handle alcohol tolerances up over 20%.

Steven Harris: 24%, the record right now is about 24%. but it might take 7 to 14 days to reach that. The easiest thing for people starting to use, is just to use Red Star oven bread yeast. That will get you to 14% in 7 to 10 days, if your bucket is around 80 - 85 degrees fahrenheit. Then you can graduate into the more exotic yeast. You can go down to your local champagne yeast, which i think is E1118 but it says "high alcohol champagne yeasts". That will get you to 18%. Then you can get into some of the more exotics, which are called turbo yeasts. Those through in nutrient and other things for the yeast such that it will do its job 48 hours instead of 7 days to 10 days. What you can do now, is you can get off of the grocery store shelf. It will start you off with your first batch, with 10 pounds of sugar and a 5 gallon pale with 4 gallons and 1 quart of water. So 4.25 gallons of water. A couple packages of Red Star yeast, through a lid on it, put a fermentation lock on it, available from your local brewery store and let it start bubbling.

<13:10>

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<13:10>

Jack Spirko: Once I get that, i am going to get a yield out of there. I am going to have a little bit of loss in the volume, but then i am going to have to distill it.

Steven Harris: Yes

Jack Spirko: When I distil it i am going to start out with about 4.25 gallons, what am i going to end up with if I have 14% alcohol in a distilled fuel?

Steven Harris: You are going to end up with about 1/3 of a gallon of 92% ethanol, which would be 184 proof.

<13:38>

Jack Spirko: Thats wicked stuff right there, man. <laughs>

Steven Harris: Right. Actually the way premium vodka, you know triple distilled Grey Goose and everything else. What you do is you distil it. Then you take that and you put it back into the still. You distil it again, take that, put it back into the still Distil it again, put that back in the still and distil it again. That's called triple distilled. That's were XXX came from on jars of moonshine because it meant it was triple distilled. You actually distil it up to 184 - 190 proof. Then what Grey Goose does is they add distilled water back to it, to bring it back down to 40% or 80 proof.

Jack Spirko: Gotcha

<14:21>

Steven Harris: What we're going to do to make ethanol alcohol, the examples I have for you here are not triple distilled they are quadruple distilled. We actually distill it 4 times to get it up to 92% or 184 proof. Usually this is where the magic is; the still, the column, the pot, the fire underneath the pot, cooling water and everything, the column ration 24 to 1 to get 192 proof off at the end of the column. I have a table top still for you that is a little bigger than a coffee maker. You plug the thing into the wall and pour in your wash. I put it on a timer from Walmart. For my first run I'll say, 'run my first batch for 3 hours and 30 minutes'. I set it and I go away, because it has a fan for the cooling instead of having water cooling. I set it in the morning and I come back and there is my first batch of alcohol done. It did it from 14% to 50%. Then I will pour in more of my wash our of my 5 gallon pales and I'll say 'do it again for another 3 hours and 30 minutes.' I'll tell it to do this about 4 times for one 5 gallon pale and then i got a batch of 50%. Then for my batch of 50%, I pour my batch of 50% back into the still again. I run that for 4 hours and 20 mins. Just a little $8 Walmart digital timer, say monday start at 12:05, Monday ends at 3:35. It will run for 3.5 hours. On my second run I do it for 4 hours and 20 minutes. That moves me for 50% alcohol to 80% alcohol. If you were doing distillation for spirits to drink, this is where you would generally purify it and add more distilled water to bring it back down. I run it even again for 80%  to 89% in another run. Then I run 89% to 92% in the fourth distillation.

<16:31>

Jack Spirko: Gotcha. One thing we should point out if we are doing this for consumption in The United States of America, it is....

Steven Harris: Illegal!

Jack Spirko: Illegal, correct. But if we wanted to do this for making fuel it is completely legal. There is one thing we have to do when we are finished with it, so it is not drinkable anymore and that makes it legal. What is that?

Steven Harris: You have to add 2% gasoline to it.

Jack Spirko: That is pretty easy thing to do. Some of us are running numbers and we want to know the economics of this little mini still. Is it actually profitable to me, to make my fuel this way. In anyway shape or form.

<17:09>

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<17:09>

Steven Harris: Yes it is, but let me back step one and say you got to have a permit from the federal government to distil alcohol for fuel. It is completely free, F R E E. It is from ttb.gov. They will give you a free permit for 10,000 gallons a year. Some states require you to have a permit, most don't. Check with you local state government. Texas doesn't for example.Then there are the economics of this. If you use sugar from Walmart, it would cost you about $9 in sugar to make about half a gallon of ethanol fuel. Now that would be $18 a gallon of gas equivalent. Which is horrible for for a price of fuel, great for a price of whisky. Keep in mind if you are listening to this in New Zealand, it is perfectly legal to distill alcohol in New Zealand for consumption purposes. We don't have to have the disqualifies for them. It get you started. Start with sugar and water, because it gets you going.

<18:19>

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<18:19>

Jack Spirko: Now you've learned the process, right? Thats the most important thing. You learn how to do it, you convince yourself you can do it.

Steven Harris: Exactly. Once you've done sugar fermented to alcohol and distil the alcohol and then you put it into a little cup and lit it. You see this beautiful blue flame. You go "yeah man I did this. This is mine, I can do it again." Then we get you into a step where you go get free donuts. You have heard of day old donuts. Well 2 day old donuts, 3 day old donuts, those things are through away. They have a high sugar content. They have a great simple starch content in them. You put them in a bucket. You add water. You take a drill with a paint mixer, you slurry them all up like they are a big blender. Heat them up to about boiling point let them cool down a bit. You though in a that time, lets call it Alpha Amylase. Which is an enzyme that breaks down the starch. Starch is nothing but a long chain of sugars. These enzymes start breaking down the long chains in the sugar chain. Alpha Amylase happens to be kind of familiar, it is spit. It is the same thing that is in your spit. When you start salivating and eating something your Alpha Amylase, your saliva starts breaking down the sugars even before they reach your stomach. Then you take what you are mixing up and let it cool down a little bit more and you throw in what is called Glucoamylase. That finishes breaking everything down from starch down into the final sugars. You take a little bit of your wash out and you put it into a little, not test tube because i don't want to be that fancy, you but it into a little cup. You add couple drops of iodine, which is iodine solution from Walmart, like you put onto a cut. If it turns purple, you still got some starch present. So you go back and add a little more heat and add a little more enzyme until there is no purple left. This is called the "Six Step Process." It is 100% completely documented in explicit detail with color photos, circles, explanations in the bible  of alcohol fuels we have called "Alcohol can be a Gas". That book along with the distiller and everything else we are talking about is on iMakeMyGas.com. You can also go to Solar1234.com there will be a link there to it, plus all the show notes and everything else. David Blume wrote this book. He used to be Alcohol guy for Mother Earth News, going all the way back to the 1980s. He was a good friend of even Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller even wrote the introduction to it. David Blume is the god on the face of the planet earth, probably the number 1 most knowledgeable person in the world, in make alcohol fuel. He took 4 years to write the book "Alcohol can be a Gas". It weights 4 pounds, it will stop a 9mm bullet. It is 632 pages long. It covers everything you could possible think of making alcohol form starch, making alcohol from sugar, which enzymes to use, what temperatures, how modify a car to run on pure alcohol. Which is pretty easy you what you call a fooler on the engine, it holds the injectors open a little bit longer. Alcohol is a little bit less dense than gasoline. He talks extensively in the book about how your car, your american made or foreign made gasoline car right now will run on about 50% alcohol and 50% gasoline. Or 50% E85 and 50% Ethanol so what you are doing with us, whether you just want to mix it 20% / 80% or 30% / 70% , alcohol and gasoline. Or if you want to go get E85 and do a mixture of E85 and gasoline, it is in the book. Or if you want to take your vehicle and convert it over to run 100% ethanol alcohol. I mean 100% ethanol alcohol fuel, even though it is only 92% or 90%. The book covers on how to do that and you run a vehicle with slight modification off of this alcohol that we are talking about your producing today with the tabletop still.

<22:58>

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<22:58>

Jack Spirko: It is awesome. I have the book because Steve sent me a copy. It is a college education in one book on alcohol fuels. That is the best way I can put it.

Steven Harris: But it is written at a six grade level.

Jack Spirko: It is. It is very easy to understand.

Steven Harris: A 5th grader or 6th grader could read this and go "Oh boy, I am going to get drunk tonight.

Jack Spirko: <Laughs>

Steven Harris: He covers everything there in it. One it is entertaining. He has about every liberal cartoon against oil you can think of in the book so it kind of holds your attention. Plus, it is full of photographs that he has been taking for the last 30 years. He shows you everything, every little part, every little how to. He shows you how every still is made, how reflux distillation is done how rear plate distillation is done, what raschig rings are, how you can use pot scrubbers from Walmart as a substitute for your column packing. The diameter of the columns to get 192 proof out you need to have 24 to 1 column ratio. So if you got 2 inch internal diameter, you have to have a 48 inch column still. It has to be 48 inches tall. if you have a 3 inch diameter still you can put this many gallons through it per day per hour, and it has to be 72 inches tall. But it doesn't have any plans in it on how to build a still. It shows you how stills are made and all the different parts and you can make a still off of it, but it doesn't have any step by step plans. Plus the still is generally fired by fire underneath of it,which is temperature controlled. You have to have a high column but you got to have wide diameter, which means a higher column that is higher then the ceiling in your garage. That is why we got this little tabletop distiller for you to start with. It is, by far, cheaper then getting a larger column stove and it gets you started today. It get you started doing with what you want right now. If you ran that little tabletop distiller and you had alcohol can be a gas and you mashed up your own doughnuts and you put in the enzymes and you fermented it and you made your own mash lets say you did this in 4 or 5 gallon pales. If you ran your distiller twice a day for 4 days, so in the morning when you left for work and at night before you when to bed, you would make 1 gallon of 92% ethanol in that period of 4 days. That includes the 4 distillations, because I am counting running twice a day as running distillation 2, distillation 3, distillation 4 in that process. Now that doesn't sound like much, but we are talking about a still that cost about $215 plus $15 shipping. We are talking about something that you can do today. I am talking about 1 gallon of fuel that you made in four days. That 1 gallon of fuel will work in your lawn mower your generator you can try it in vehicle, we'll go over some of those details. It is 1 gallon that you made today. That one gallon might take you, depending on your vehicle, 12 miles or 20 miles or 30 miles or some vehicles up to 40 miles. That is something you did that was underneath your own control, that you did with without permission from anyone else. It gets you, like Jack says, "Now I understand, I can do it". Now you can intelligently say, "I can get what is called a farm bread, from my local bakery store, you know the  bakery outlet store." What happens when it is too old for the bakery outlet store? It becomes what is called farm bread. It goes to farmers for pigs and other animal feed. I got photographs of my pickup truck, which I should put up on the website, just full of farm bread that I got for just a few dollars. You can take that farm bread, mash it up, heat it up, add your enzymes, convert it into a sugar, ferment the sugars into alcohol, then distill the alcohol up to 192 proof. To get you started at a basic level so you can go "I can do it".

<27:18>

[Hootie]

<27:18>

Jack Spirko: Let me put it into perspective for people, Steve. I think one thing that people need to see... Lets say it is a gallon a week you are making. You can actually do it in 4 days, but let's say you just do a gallon a week and you take 2 weeks a year off. Thats 50 gallons of fuel a year.

Steven Harris: Let alone if you ran 2 stills at the same time.

Jack Spirko: Then it is a hundred. If you did it actually every 4 days, I don't want to do the math and figure it out but it is probably closer to about 180 (doing the math 365.242days in a year / 4days to make alcohol * 2 stills = 182.6 gallons per year... close enough), if you kept it going constantly. I mean that is a significant amount of fuel for the average person.

Steven Harris: The timer makes it automated. You have a column still and everything, usually you are baby sitting it. Controlling the heat, the temperature at the top of the column, which is covered extensively in "Alcohol can be a Gas". You are sitting there babysitting and watching the drops come out and producing the fuel. When you take the simple tabletop still which has its own fan for cooling, you plug into the wall and put the timer on it's automated. You got to determine your own times because it varies based on your mash, it varies based on your room temperature. It toke 3 hour 25 minutes for me for my first run. I know if i fill it up to 3/4 inches from the top with the wash and plug it in every day I can set it for 3 hours and 25 minutes. I will come back to a 50% alcohol distillate, that I will then save off and use for my secondary runs. I do all my first runs first. Then I do all my second distillation, second. Then all my third distillations third. With that timer I know I can always do it at 3 hours and 25 minutes. The way I know that is because I have a test kit. A test kit consists of a vertical jar, a cylinder, and a hydrometer. A hydrometer is nothing more then a piece of glass with numbers on it, that has a lead weight on the bottom. It bobs up or down, higher or lower, and tells you your alcohol percentage in your cylinder, which is a long skinny beaker. Has it comes out, i alway take off the first 2 cups and pour into the cylinder and say, "Ok, I am at this proof right now." For my first run, I got 14% in pot and I am going to go to 50%. I always keep on distilling until what is coming out is 25% and then I stop. When I reach 25% that is my timer mark, to turn the timer off. You don't get a lot of 25% off. It really goes from 14% to 50% and it stays there for a long period of time. Then it falls off real quick. Your looking for that fall off time. That is your cut off point. When you look back into the pot you'll see what is missing. In this case about 25% of the wash you put in there is missing. It has come out in the form of water and alcohol, as 50% alcohol into your pot on the outside. Anyways that is how I set my times. I could talk about this ever.

<30:36>

[Hootie]

<30:36>

Jack Spirko: That makes sense. The thing is, if it is not done and you went too sort just do it for a little longer until you figure out what the right amount is. It's a lot like when I asked you about upping the pressure using bio gas, you said "throw another rock on top of it, until you get it where you want it".

Steven Harris: Exactly, throw another brick on top of the bag until you get the pressure where you want it. Do worry about if you left too much alcohol in your resulting wash. All you do is throw it back into your bucket of your next fermentation and you have lost nothing.

Jack Spirko: that makes perfect sense to me. One thing I want to talk about before we move forward. I want to tell people where they can get all of this stuff. There are a lot of people out there, that are under the same misconception I was. That this stuff is highly corrosive and dangerous to put into our cars. You put it into your car and your car is going to explode. Or it is going to eat your seals away, it is going to eat your gaskets away. I even hear some similar stuff from Ed Wallace who I trust a lot in the car industry. You want to address that for everybody, because you gave me an real education on this.

Steven Harris: Yeah, I want to address it. Remember my background is as a vehicle engineer. I did research and development for Diamond and Chrysler. Have done vehicle test and development in my specialty was jeeps and dodge trucks. I work on vehicle development in scientific labs. I have man years in wind tunnels, man years in proving grounds testing in the desert heat and the winter cold. I have had complete fuel systems apart and in pieces, because I put my instrumentation on them for testing. If you are describing something that is corroding the fuel lines and eating them away and your gaskets are disappearing. Especially with your gaskets disappearing, you're talking about sulfuric acids doing this type of destruction. Ethanol alcohol is something you drink, to put it into perspective. It is not a corrosive element, that absolutely goes in and destroys your vehicles fuel system. The caveat to that are the following; What does destroy fuel like that is called methanol alcohol. Methanol is a completely different alcohol. It is like apples and oranges, both fruits but both completely different. Methanol alcohol , which you are not making in any shape or form or component there of with what we are doing. That is because we are not running a hot fire. You are making methanol, when you are making ethanol alcohol by running too hot of a first and heating up your mash and breaking down the components of the mash parts of which are methanes and methanols. Methanols are very corrosive. The other slight caveat that might extend to some older vehicles that would work in a very slow motion matter is... It does not destroy the seals. The seals don't care about ethanol alcohol and whether is there is 80% water in it or not. Some older vehicles with different metal fuels lines, not the modern stainless steel ones, might have a very slow motion reaction to some of the water is in the lines. We have been running oxygenated fuels for a very long time in the country. Your fuel tanks aren't metal. They're high density polyethylene, they are blow molded plastic. The fuel pumps are all made to run off of oxygenated fuels. How do you oxygenate a fuel you add ethanol. We have been running 10% in our cars for over 25 to 30 years in most of the states, not it is in all of the states. We have been running ethanol in vehicles for a very long period of time. Let alone with today's flex fuel vehicles designed to take any amount of ethanol from 100% all the way down to E85 down to E20, E15, and stuff. All the material science for the components has been changed, so they are as neutral as you can possibly think of. Not only do our vehicles have to last to 10 to 15 years, they don't rot out as quickly as used to and people are keeping them longer. We don't know how the fuel system is going to change a good example of that, last year there was a big push to go from E10 which is where we are now 10% ethanol 90% gasoline to E15. Let's just put 5% more ethanol in all the fuel and get rid of 5% less gasoline that we have to import from the middle east and we make it domestically with corn, a whole other subject. That was getting pushed through and the automobile company was going "No No No, we don't have E15 in our manuals"! That is bible in anything in a car is what's in the manual. Never the less, the forethought of the vehicle if it can handle 10% ethanol it can handle 15% ethanol. If it can handle 15% ethanol it is going to handle your E85 that is going into it. Which which was the big problem we had someone writing, because David Blume tells you in "Alcohol Can Be a Gas" and I tell you the same thing, we run 50/50 of E85 and gasoline in our personal vehicles for years. There are no problem, no fuel line corrosion, not injector problems, no gasket problems. It is something you can start to do today.

<35:05>

[Hootie]

<35:05>

Jack Spirko: To be fair to Ed Wallace now that I hear you said that. That was one of his big concerns was the manuals, and people getting screwed on warranty repairs by the manufacturer even if ethanol alcohol wasn't the cause of the problem. Where somebody goes "I have this fuel system problem" and they say "Did you run E15 or higher" and if they say yes, well ok. If everyone has been doing it at that point, they'll say "we know you have done it" and people not getting there warranties covered. Even if it wasn't the alcohol that caused the problem, because you have violated the manual.

<36:42>

Steven Harris: Yeah, exactly. The manual it the bible for the vehicle and it is what determines your warranty and everything else.

Jack Spirko: So we are making policy decisions based on a manual that is just a number the  throughout at the time, because it was the standard at the time.

Steven Harris: Yeah. The vehicle was engineered for the manual. You can sue a company based on what is in the owners manual. That is used for the defense in legal law suits all the time, is "It is not in the manual" or "It is in the manual, the manual states". A great deal of work goes into what is put into the manual of a vehicle. If you had a $90,000 Lexus and you got a 3 year warranty on the thing and everything else. I would feel comfortable wit you putting E85 with 50/50 mix into it. 92% alcohol with 8% water in it, I wouldn't put into my $90,000 Lexus. I would put it into one of my other vehicles. You had a whole guy on here talking about survival vehicles and $3,000 pickup trucks and everything else. That was a great show. This is a great place to start putting this type of fuel into your vehicle. I can get into whole other subject, maybe on another show, maybe on this show. We can convert our 92% to 100%. You ask me why can't you do it right now in the still, because at 92% alcohol the water and the ethanol are boiling of at the same temperature.

<38:10>

Jack Spirko: Sure

Steven Harris: We get higher yields of ethanol because the ethanol boils off first before the water does. Once you reach a certain point, about 184 proof the ethanol and the water are boiling off at the same time you can't separate them. So what do is you take your 92% ethanol and 8% water and you pour it through a molecular sieve. Which is a fancy word for certain types of diatomaceous earth and other compounds that have holes and pores in them of a certain diameter. What it does it absorbs the water out of the alcohol and it gives you 100% out of the bottom. These are commercially available products. I'll try to find some more sources for you, for the followup show with question and answers and stuff like that. Then we are talking about pure 200 proof, pure 100% alcohol that you can mix with gasoline, make your own E85, make your own E10. You wouldn't have any of the worries, because there wouldn't be the slightest amount of water in your fuel. Of course if you live in a winter climate, like I do and you have worries about condensation of water in your fuel tank in the winter time,in the winter time if your fuel tank isn't completely full. You pour some remover in there some heat or something else. What is this generally? Happens to be ethanol alcohol. You pour in ethanol alcohol to mix to allow the water to dissolve in with the gasoline so it is uniform, so it goes through the injectors into the engine and away you go.

Jack Spirko: Do you know why I love have you on the show? Because I get you started and then the questions that I have, you just keep going and answer them before I even ask. That was going next on. What do we do about the 8% water. I think that pretty much kill that question.

<40:03>

Steven Harris:  Yeah it does. Sometimes you need to say, "Steve, long answer or short answer".

Jack Spirko: <Laughs> No, you rock on. That is what people are here for is the information. You put together a whole little kit for people. With the book and the distiller and everything like that where they can get all of this at your website, right?

Steven Harris: Lets backup... If you want all the show notes and everything we just talked about it is at Solar1234.com. There will be a link there to all of my stuff, to my background at StevenHarris.net. My website is USH2.com Knowledge Publications you can signup for my famous free family preparedness class. Which thanks to Jack, I have had over a 108,000 people take my free family preparedness class. The link is on Solar1234.com. Signup is on Solar1234.com. It links you over BeforeTheStormHits.com. That's me and my links. Solar1234.com today will link you over to iMakeMyGas.com, exactly what is sounds like iMakeMyGas.com. On there I have a complete kit. I have pallets of stuff ready to ship to you. I have a table top distiller ready to go. Again it holds 1 gallon internally, you put the top on it. It's like a coffee maker. You plug it into the wall and is distills alcohol into the bottle I have the test kit. It has a specific gravity hydrometer in it, which tells you how much sugar you have or do not have. Which you won't have to use for these beginning testes. It has the alcohol hydrometer which floats in the tube cylinder, the beaker, and it tells you what percentage of alcohol you have. You can use this to determine, "Hey, Steve ran for 3 hours and 25 minutes. I need to run for 3 hours and 15 minutes", so you can set your timer you get from Walmart to make your still production automated no babysitting required. Again this timer is an On/Off timer. You get it from Home Depot, Lowes, or Walmart. its $8, you plug it into the wall. You type in when to start when to stop. Also on the website w have the book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas" by David Blume, the bible on alcohol production. There is a picture of it and I got a quarter and a dime sitting on it, to show you just how big this thing is. Like I said, it will stop a 9mm bullet. We have David Blume's hour long DVD. Which is his entire class on alcohol. It is called "Alcohol Can Be a Gas DVD", it is up there on the website. And we have a combo deal for you. If you want the still and the measurement kit and the DVD and the book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas". I'll give you a discount, I'll give you free shipping on the combo for anyone in the USA, and throw in a free copy for Sun Shine to Dollars. Anyone outside the USA, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia.... You know what, you all listen to Jack's show from around the world, so I'll take care of you. You can email me and say where you are I'll write back to you real quick with a shipping price. The shipping price is no profit to us, it is the exact price to ship it to you. I don't have anything else on iMakeMyGas.com, it is just those things nothing extraneous. Nothing more than you need. It will get you started with making ethanol alcohol and really since we're on The Survival Podcast, Jack. Part of this show really has to do with survival, and part of survival has to do with bartering and trading. Which might be a post-apocalyptic non-law prevalent society. The knowledge of how to make your own alcohol, and ability to trade alcohol for goods and services, is a very powerful thing. It is technically illegal in The United States. Right now you can not make alcohol to drink.

<44:21>

Jack Spirko: Not with distilling. Wine and beer...

Steven Harris: Wine and beer, but you can't distill it. If you were one of those people who were putting things away for a post-apocalyptic things. This would be a good item. It is not illegal to own a still. You can own the without the permit. You're not supposed to make fuel alcohol without the permit from the federal government. Like I said it it the size of a coffee maker it fits on your kitchen countertop.

Jack Spirko: You can get your permit at TTB.gov. You can get a permit if you need one. I am going to give one little tidbit here, Steve on how you can sort of cheat to distill and do it legally. I would be more like making a fortified wine or fortified beer. A German's would call it, Eiswein. What you can actually do if you bring an alcoholic wort, pre-beer beer, or a must of wine down to a temperature just slightly below freezing the first thing that will freeze will be what Steve?

Steven Harris: The water. Now the way you technically do this is...

Jack Spirko: <Laughs>

Steven Harris: To my under standing, I could be wrong... To my understanding it is illegal to freeze and concentrate wine in The United States. I could be wrong, you can Google it.

Jack Spirko: I don't think that is true. There is too many home brewers books with it in there as a technique.

<45:52>

Steven Harris: The way you do it is you put your mixture in the freezer, you keep it still, and you let it freeze. You keep on checking the temperature. Once it gets below 32 fahrenheit you drop in one ice cube and that is your seed crystal. Then all of the water will start freezing on that piece of ice, that you put in as the seed crystal. It will leave a higher concentration. You should do it with a seed crystal. It will kind of happen without the seed crystal. The seed crystal is just an ice cube. It makes the whole process go allot quicker.

Jack Spirko: Remove the slush and you have a fortified wine or a fortified beer.

Steven Harris: We would call that in Europe, brandy!

Jack Spirko: <laughs> I guess you're right. I haven't really thought about it.

Steven Harris: That is one of the ways of making brandy.

Jack Spirko: Now you know more then you did before.

Steven Harris: Right. You can read online about making alcohol to drink. There is something called the heads, the hearts, and the tails. The heads is about the first 2% of your alcohol. Out of this distiller you would collect first shot of what ever was coming out and you would pour it down the drain. Or use it as fuel. Then you would collect your middle and end runs. The first stuff coming off is some of the acetone,  ketones, and aldehydes which are made in the fermentation process. This is what gives you a hangover, is these components. You are trying to throw them away so you don't get a hangover. Not to say they are extensively harmful or anything. You might get a hangover from them. They will add some flavor some aroma to the alcohol. To put it into perspective when you make beer or wine all these byproducts are left over in the beer or wine that you are drinking. Which is the same thing as making the wash, to distill for the vodka that you would make with the still. That kind of puts it into perspective...

<47:51>

Jack Spirko: We just refer to them as impurities. They are impurities and that is what they are. That's why you get less of a hangover from a clear liquor like a vodka then you do from some good old Jack Daniels, will kind of turn into your worst nightmare if you over imbibe in something like that.

Steven Harris: Yep, you took the words out of my mouth. That is the difference from drinking Grey Goose and drinking the same amount of alcohol in wine. With one you will get a bad hang over and with the other you won't. It is because of all the foreshot products, all the heads that are left in it from the alcohol production processes. Which is just the way alcohol is made.

Jack Spirko: Absolutely. Very cool man. Again folks the website here is iMakeMyGas.com and Solar1234.com will get you everything. Of course I'll have everything like I always do in our show notes. You'll be able to link to all of these just by going to The Survival Podcast and going to today's episode. I am sure, Steven you probably want to hear, we have opened a lot of minds and created a lot of questions because that is usually how those two things go together. I am sure you would love to hear all the questions we are going to get on this subject and comeback and answer them.

<49:00>

Steven Harris: Go to the show notes page, Jack's page where we talk about the show and enter all your questions. Enter everything you can think of, every truth, every fib, every myth, every fiction, every question, everything you have read. We will take care of them all on another show. Let me go down through my  notes here to make sure we haven't missed anything; Cheap donuts. Farm bread. Pastry droppings from places that make pastries and there dough falls on the floor all the time, you can get that as a cheap source of stock for making alcohol fuel. Coke syrup, if you live near a big post you can actually get molasses imported. Molasses is  imported into The United States all the time, for an addition to an animal feed. So you can get blackstrap molasses and other molasses before and after the sugars have been taken out. You can get it cheap and you can make your own alcohol from it. Cattails, you can make alcohol from cattails. It is very big in the book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas" he talks about cattail farming extensively. As you know you can eat most parts of cattails. If you can eat it, it's starch. If it is starch, you can covert it over to sugars. If it is sugar you can ferment it into alcohol.

<50:08>

Jack Spirko: That's awesome.

Steven Harris: Jerusalem artichokes you can grow in the ground that will make a high percentage of alcohol.

Jack Spirko: I want to stop you there. Sunchokes, the root tubers of sunchokes we can use to make alcohol?

Steven Harris: Jerusalem artichokes is what we call them

Jack Spirko: There's billions of those growing wild all over the south, from Florida to California.

Steven Harris: Yep, they grow like a weed. Sweet sorghum, is a sweeter version of sorghum you can use. Let's say you live in Washington state, like a friend of mine does. He gets bad apples by the barrel load. He runs them through an apple press. Compresses out the juice. He ferments the apple juice into alcohol all the time. What else is in my notes here... Oh god Jack, I learned a good thing from you about brewing. Something that makes a good brewing container is a 10gallon insulated barrel from Home Depot. That was an awesome trick you taught me. Let's see... It is legal in New Zealand, it is illegal in The United States. We covered the fuel system. The MSB discount. There is a Membership Brigade discount for me, Steven Harris, USH2.com Knowledge Publications. The MSB discount applies to all of my book and DVDs on USH2.com, there is a link at Solar1234.com.

Jack Spirko:  Folks that is 15% everything there

Steven Harris: Yeah. Solar1234.com has a link to USH2.com. You get 15% off all of my book and all my DVDs. Join Jack's Membership Brigade. The 15% discount does not apply to I Make My Gas or to Alcohol Can Be a Gas and the distiller because those prices on that website we put up for you and for Jack's listeners are already at the lowest price we can offer. I just don't mess around I just give you the best price we can possibly even get, because you guys respond so good. The audience is so great. They love the stuff that we do. Satisfaction is guaranteed on everything we have. Don't worry I take care of you left and right. If there is any problems, any questions, anything with your order, anything with shipping. We respond quickly to our emails and we 100% take care of you. We especially take care of Jack's customers.

Jack Spirko: Cool man. I want to tell you folks, this kit that Steven has put together, I am going to get one. I'll just put it to you that way. I'll endorse it by saying I am going to get one. I do believe that he has the right name for his overall company. Which is Knowledge Publications. A lot of this stuff sound great, it sounds like great in theory. You can read a book on it, you can see all the stuff on it. Let's face it. If you have never done it before, you often feel over your head. When someone can put it together in a simple to assemble kit. Where you can just set it up, plug it in, and follow instructions, and do it. It switches the psychology from theory to practice. Once you have done it in practice, you start to see a million different ways that you can do it for yourself. It is not just an investment in a product that would do something for you, but an investment in a knowledge acquisition so you can take it further and as far as you choose to. Maybe this is all you want to do, if so this will do it for you. If you ever get to a point where you want to produce, I don't know, 50 gallons a month. This starts you on the path to be able to do that.

<53:37>

Steven Harris: Jack there is something we completely forgot. You're going to have to go to the front of the show and add something in. We are giving away 5 copy of the $47 book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas". We are giving away over 4th, the 5th, and the 6th of October (2011) for survival podcast listeners. So if you are listening to this right now and it is October 4th, the 5th, and the 6th of 2011. You can go to either Solar1234.com get the link to IMakeMyGas.com. The page will popup, there is a little video there, a little intro but scroll down just one half of a page and right next to the book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas", and keep in mind this is the 4 pound 600 page book it cost $47, there is a signup there for your name and your email. Enter your name and enter your email, it is all underneath privacy policy and Jack's policy. We don't sell or give away, you might get some emails from us that is about it. You put your name and email in there and the 1st person, the 5th person, the 20th person to sign up, the 100th person to sign up, and 500th person to sign up, will all get a free copy of "Alcohol Can Be a Gas" sent to them. If you already purchased it for me, either years ago or if you just picked upt the kit or the book on the website and you win, I will give you a check, a refund, trade credit, gold/silver/pennies, what ever you want. I will refund you money or I will send you a free book

Jack Spirko: <laughs> Awesome.

Steven Harris: Jack and Steve and me..... 'Steve and me' the same person  

Jack Spirko: <laughs> We will announce the winners, their first name and last initial and their state, and we will write to them personally. We will announce the winners on October 7th of 2011.

Steven Harris: We will announce the winners, their first name and last initial and their state, and we will write to them personally. We will announce the winners on October 7th of 2011.

Jack Spirko: Actually on the show, Steve, it will actually be the Monday after the weekend that I will make the announcement because I will be in Salt Lake for the Self Reliance Expo on that day. It will be on Solar1234.

<55:58>

Steven Harris: It will be on Solar1234.com. I'll email the person. Jack will email person, to say you won, so you know it is legit. We will publish the winners, so everyone knows we published the winners.

Jack Spirko: I want to do something right here because you keep talking about how big this book is. I am holding the book in my hand it is about 6 inches above my desk right now. <huge thud noise, as the book impacts the desk> That's the book...

Steven Harris: <Laughs>

Jack Spirko: <Laughs> It is really a bible on alcohol fuels. Steve, I love it because you always bring information. You always bring great opportunities for people. You have the heart of a servant and you want to increase peoples knowledge. Having you on the show with all of this is awesome. I love that you always do something for the audience, give something away so thanks for that.

Steven Harris: Jack, your audience really makes me go the extra mile. I worked for an entire week putting together, "what am I going to do for the show? What am I going to do for the show? What am I going to say?" I wanted to say it in step 1 2 3 4. I wanted to explain it. I wanted them to be able to do it, because your people by far more than anyone else takes what we talk about, you talk about, I talk about, and they run with it. They actually do it. As a teacher, you and I are, as an instructor, that is the biggest compliment that we can ever get. I am continually amazed people tell me, "I got your book sunshine to dollars. I got all this free glass. I got some solar panels for free and I made a hot water heater." I think with other authors we do the same thing it is like, "Someone actually did what we wrote about". Even after all of these years, I am continually amazed. When I get a response like that, I put in the extra midnight oil on it.

Jack Spirko: Again Steve it has been absolutely outstanding episode every time I have you on, I know you are going to want to come back. I just want to say thank you for being on The Survival Podcast and for volunteering to come back

Steven Harris: Thrilled. I will be back. Look for me in about a month or thereabouts. We'll take care of your questions and answers. My best to everyone.

Jack Spirko: With that this is has been Jack Spirko today along with one of my favorite Steven Harris. Helping you live that better life if times get tough, or even if they don't.

<58:20>

<closing song>