How to make 96% alcohol (ethanol)
Be sure to check your country's laws, and obtain the necessary permits and licensing before you start producing alcohol or distilling it.
Raw materials: Sugar cane, corn, grain, rice, potatoes, berries, fruits, yams, tapioca, carrots, peas, and any other produce rich in sugar or starch.
Yeast: There are several strains of yeast available and some may cause an unpleasant taste or odor in the finished alcohol. There are certain strains that are specifically made for alcohol production, these tend to be resistant to higher alcohol concentrations, up to 20% and work faster than regular yeast. Regular baking yeast can produce up to 18% alcohol, but the smell of yeast may still remain in the finished product. If you do a good job at filtration it will be hardly noticeable though.
Fermentation: Three
things are produced during fermentation, heat, carbon dioxide and alcohol. The
CO2 is of no use unless you want to make beer or champagne.
Heat is
crucial to fermentation, keep the temperature at about 35 Celsius, if the
temperature rises above 40 Celsius the yeast may die, if it goes below 20
Celsius you will have to wait an awful long time for any significant levels of
alcohol. If you want the fermentation to go faster you can achieve this by
releasing the CO2 at a faster rate through circulation of the
mixture. An aquarium air pump will work nicely, quiet and efficient.
Fermentation does give off an unmistakable smell, to avoid this you
can fix a carbon filter to your fermentation tanks, this will remove the odor
and also prevent any contamination of the mixture by bacteria. The carbon
filters from industrial gasmasks make convenient filters.
For some reason adding sodium bicarbonate to the mixture seems to help speed up
fermentation, I've seen it done and it does work.
Mixture ratio: To make a
mixture of cane sugar (Household sugar) C12H22O11,
that will produce 18% alcohol, you must use a ratio of 310 grams of sugar too 1
liter of water.
Starch must be converted to sugar before fermentation using malt enzymes.
To convert starch to sugar, it must be boiled to soften the cellular walls of
the starch.
When it has cooled to approx. 70 degrees celcius the malt is added.
The mixture is further cooled to approx. 30 degrees celcius and yeast is added.
After that, the procedure is the same as for a sugar mixture.
The still: The
still is the most important factor in the process. If you don't have a proper
still, you will never be able to make good alcohol.
A still is made up of several components.
*A boiler. Preferably a minimum of 30-50 liters volume.
*A heating element. Either built in to the boiler or external. Minimum 1500
Watts.
*A colunm. Attached to the top of the boiler. Minimum one meter long, 50-70mm in
diameter.
*A cooling system. 3/16" soft copper tubing through a water jacket works
well.
For convenience the boiler should have an inlet and
outlet for filling and emptying without having to remove the column. And the
heating element should be built in to the boiler.
The column should be filled with some substance to avoid convection streams.
Glass marbles are the best but you can use any ceramic or glass material to
achieve this, even broken bottles will do.
At the top of the column, near the outlet to the cooler you should mount a
thermometer to monitor the outlet temperature.
The cooler should be reverse flow, water entering at the end of the cooler
furthest away from the column and exiting at the hottest end of the cooler (Near
the outlet from the column).
Keeping the still clean is very important if you want to make good alcohol.
Clean all internal parts of the still regularly.
Copper will develop green coating of copper sulfate if left exposed to atmospheric
air over long periods.
Copper sulfate is poisonous but not water soluble, filter it of through a filter
paper.
Distilling:
The important thing is to keep the temperature at
the outlet of the column at 78,5 Celsius +/- 1 degree which is the boiling point
of ethanol.
The boiling point of water is as most of you know 100 Celsius therefore
most of the water will not evaporate, some will though and this is why we can't
get more than 96% ethanol by distillation. Cooling
of the heat exchanger is very important, if your cooling system fails you will
have a room filled with highly flammable alcohol vapor.
Filtration: For
filtration you should use a carbon filter of no less than 1.5 meters length.
2" PVC tubing is absolutely perfect for this. You ought to have two of
these, one for each filtration. Filter the alcohol twice and it ought to come
out almost free of odors.
If you let the alcohol air itself for a couple of days after filtration there
will be absolutely no smell to it. You wouldn't be able to tell it from water
unless you tasted it.
If you have done everything correctly you should now have 96% alcohol that is
totally odorless.
Don't drink 96% alcohol, it is much too strong and
you risk ACUTE ALCOHOL POISONING.
96% alcohol is extremely flammable. Never smoke
when distilling.
Always dilute the alcohol before drinking it. Alcohol is a solvent and will kill
off the mucus membranes of you mouth.