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re: homemade balloon wine
18 nov 2000
lou pogoda wrote:
>...how much heat does it take to evaporate a gallon of alcohol from
>8.33 gallons of water and alcohol mix when the alcohol is 12% of the
>total? and how much can you get from burning the resulting gallon?
dunno. interesting questions. if it takes 1,000 btu to evaporate a pound
of alcohol and we get 10,000 by burning it, we might be ahead of the game
with a good heat exchanger and enough insulation, especially if we ferment
indoors, and count the heat of fermentation.
>i've always read that one of the reasons the world runs on petroleum
>instead of alcohol is that producing the alcohol uses more energy than
>you can get from burning the stuff.
that may well be true, with conventional agriculture.
>in any case, such an arrangement sounds a little overly complicated - why
>not just burn the grain or fruit or whatever you're using as feedstock for
>the still directly and be done with it?
could be the moisture content is too high. then again, we have corn stoves,
and drinking alcohol could be an interesting byproduct.
nick
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