What do you like for breakfast? I have a warm spot for the elemental bacon sandwich. White bread and five or six strips of crisp bacon. Eggs are not required, but perfectly welcome.
I have drunk my share of spirituous liquor and have some vague, but fond memories of Vietnamese rice moonshine, American white lightning and Greek raki that made my elbows stop functioning. Scotch, however, I remember almost every glass.
I don’t remember having a bacon sandwich and a glass of moonshine together, but it is possible. The beauty of that meal is it is a closed system.
Take some corn, add a bit of water, mash it a bit and add yeast. The little yeast creatures eat the naturally occurring sugar in the corn. Since the yeast do not have cable, they do the cell division thing. Wait a week. You get partially digested corn mixed with very valuable yeast poop: Alcohol.
This how humans have made beer and wine since the dawn of time, except for beer we use barley malt with hops and crushed grapes and juice for wine. Naturally brewed beer usually comes in at 5% alcohol; Wine generally comes in at 10% alcohol. These are good numbers that mean if you’re in a country with bad water, drink beer or wine. The alcohol kills the bacteria that could give you the Screaming Uranus.
However, we were talking corn originally. It is important as you shall see. Heat the corn slops to get the alcohol to boil off, then condense the steam and you have moonshine: Raw, 80% ethanol.
Do the same thing with vintage grape wine in a very specific area of France and you’re making the beginnings of Cognac. Barley and Oats will eventually become Scottish Whisky using the same process. Potatoes will make Vodka.
You feed the leftover mash to pigs, or cows as there is still enough usable nutrition in the mash to act as a major component of livestock feed. Cow, Pig, Ostrich, Llama or Moose: Doesn’t matter much to them. Most commonly it is fed to pigs.
Livestock manure, what is left of corn after being fermented, boiled and run through an animal is used add nutrients to fields to help the plants grow better. This means more plentiful crops, which means more moonshine and bacon eventually.
This is a good, natural, closed system. We can have a pleasurable beverage in the evening and grow some bacon for breakfast, or yogurt or corn bread. Except I live in a fourteenth floor highrise apartment. I can’t have a cow and a pig up here, or grow enough corn to make it worthwhile. Then there is the whole illegal-still-moonshiner-arrested-in-Mississauga headline in the Toronto Star.
Alcohol is a basic organic solvent for chemists. It can sterilize things for medical use. It can get you so drunk you wake up three days later in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia wondering why you are not wearing pants and have a wad of Turkish money in your shirt pocket.
It is also a fuel for internal combustion engines. As the price of oil goes up, it looks better and better to “grow” our own fuel. We don’t have to be beholden to foreign governments, don’t have to dig it out of the ground and as long as we can grow, ferment and distill stuff, we can make more of it. It is not ‘finite’ like oil or coal. It is a biofuel.
The problem is the rest of the world. They need our grain as food. Farmers, being farmers, look at which pays better. Corn for ethanol pays better than corn for export to the other 95% of the world that doesn’t have enough to eat.
We can make alcohol from things other than food grains. Wheat straw works fine. Corn stalks will do. Wood chips, stems from dope plants, just about anything with cellulose or starch will work. Add some enzymes to break down the cellulose in the plant to make elemental sugars, then add the yeast. Iogen Corporation in Ottawa is a world pioneer in efficiently producing ethanol from the stuff farmers toss away at harvest time.
Where it falls over is in the money: Oil companies, who are leading the production of ethanol, don’t want to make it from less than ideal things. They want to make it out of corn or sugar cane, or beets, as that is the cheapest and fastest way to get from biomass to gas. It costs them less to produce. They can mark it up insanely, blame farmers for being greedy and wrap themselves in a big ol’ Green flag at the same time.
Biofuels from organic sources are going to be critical in the next few years. We need the petroleum left to make important things, like medicines or specialized plastics that can’t be made of anything else. Substituting biofuel for transport, heat and electricity generation is generally good. So is solar and wind generation, as well as conservation.
There is no rational reason to take perfectly good food and make ethanol out of it to power a Chevy Suburban. Especially if that Chevy Suburban drives from the parking garage of an 11th floor condo in West Van to the Whole Foods store on Main. I bet the driver feels all warm and fuzzy about using ethanol blended fuel to transport themselves and their organically grown hemp fiber reusable grocery bags to buy unbleached flour and fair-trade coffee beans. They are doing a couple of slightly good things, but a bunch of bad things.
Food made into moonshine and bacon sandwiches is good. Food for the rest of world to eat is even better.
Use ethanol fuel, absolutely, but question where the ethanol comes from. Fuel from Food is almost a sin.
RoadDave 