In case you were wondering, that beautiful still of yours is good for more than just making fantastic liquor. If you’re a homesteader or live in a rural area, what about distilling your own water? Distilled water is what you want to put in your flooded-cell batteries (like the 16 deep-cycle batteries in our solar-system battery bank). And of course it’s a good idea, no matter where you are, to have an emergency supply of potable water in case of emergencies or disasters. Many people don’t know that their water supply may depend on having electrical power; if you’re not sure about this, make a point of finding out and being prepared.
We have our own water supply, but what if our pump breaks down and we can’t get drinking water to the house? We live far enough away from town and neighbors to opt for distilling water when it’s needed.
Distilling water is quite simple. First make sure your still is super-clean; use the cleaning process in chapter 19 as a guideline. Fill your still’s boiling pot ¾ full of water. Heat it to boiling as usual, remembering to turn the condenser’s water supply on by the time the water gets to about 66°C/150°F. Make sure the needle valve is wide open; you’re not going to be separating anything, just collecting the condensed water vapor. Have a clean jar or bottle in place to collect the distilled water.
I mentioned my small Pyrex essential-oil distiller. While I have in fact used this distiller for extracting essential oils and hydrosols, I have also used it on occasion for a small liquor distillation run. It’s also handy for distilling small batches of gin, since I can use the plant-material chamber to hold the juniper berries and spices for flavoring the gin.
Essential oils are useful for a lot of things. I used to use them for making my own massage oil blends, as well as homemade soaps, bath salts, that kind of thing. More recently, I have been learning to make a variety of herbal remedies, many using essential oils and infusions of herbs and botanicals. So that little distiller is coming in more and more handy.
I should point out that, while I sometimes use the essential-oil distiller for liquor, I never use the larger still for making essential oils. It doesn’t have a chamber for holding plant material for one thing, and it would be a royal pain to clean afterward for another thing. I like things to be efficient, and that little distiller was made specifically for essential-oil production.
We live in an area with a lot of lavender farms and lavender- related businesses. I’m not growing lavender up here yet, but no doubt I will at some point; the climate is ideally suited to it, even at our elevation. Lavender essential oil has many well-known medicinal properties, and I use it a lot for various remedies. I even put a few drops in a spray bottle of water and use it to mist guest-room pillow cases. It’s also great for spraying on your broom before sweeping; it helps keep the dust to a minimum and smells great in the process.
If you were born after 1980, you might think that the recent push to be more “green” is something new. The 1970s, though, was a decade marked by economic hardship and the so-called energy crisis. (Not, of course, that I remember back that far!) In Seattle, where I grew up, Boeing (the major area employer in those pre-Microsoft days) was forced to lay off thousands of workers; remember the billboard that read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn off the lights?” By the mid-1970s, when I was in high school, the back-to-the-land movement was in full swing. New magazines like Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening provided valuable information to thousands eager to learn how to grow their own food, consume less gasoline and electricity, and generally live simpler, more frugal lives.
Not surprisingly, many people striving for self-sufficiency became interested in making their own backyard fuel, namely ethanol. Don’t be deceived by the term “fuel ethanol.” Ethanol is ethanol, whether you drink it or put it in your mower’s fuel tank. Before long, the government, faced with mounting piles of applications for distilling permits, had to make a decision. Since they were the ones exhorting the masses to use less fuel (“We’re in an energy crisis!” they shrilled), they were hardly in a position to make difficulties for enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers willing to do the work of making their own fuel.
So an exception to the usual rules was made, and to this day, the process of obtaining a permit to make fuel ethanol is basically the same. While you do have to file some paperwork, the permit doesn’t cost anything. You’ll have to explain what you will use to denature your ethanol; you’re required to add something to your ethanol that renders it undrinkable, like wood alcohol or high-octane gasoline. Makes sense, I guess, from the suspicious bureaucrat’s point of view. The expectation seems to be that if the ethanol isn’t denatured, a large percentage of it would be consumed at Happy Hour, not during the daily commute. In any case, the easing of the permit process for fuel ethanol proves that the government is capable of modifying the laws so they make sense; it’s just that they rarely seem to have the will to do so.
The first cars ran on ethanol. When gasoline came on the scene, around the time that assembly-line car production was booming and Americans were taking to the roads by the thousands, it soon replaced ethanol as the fuel of choice because it was cheaper. Did you know that racing cars usually run on pure ethanol? With some adjustment to the typical automotive engine, greater speed is possible when ethanol is the fuel because combustion is more complete than with gasoline.
Some cars are in production already that are made to run on ethanol. However, in recent years, gasoline has been so relatively cheap that few in the government seem motivated to pursue alternatives that are (at least at the moment) more expensive. There are books out there, even some government publications (which virtually never go out of print) on the subject of fuel ethanol and how to modify gasoline engines to run on ethanol. Personally I love working on cars, and am intrigued by the challenge of doing some advanced tinkering with carburetors and such; I daresay anyone with good mechanical skills would be able to tackle this project.
Talking of fuel ethanol leads nicely into part of my proposal to change the laws around distilling. Read on for a look at what would happen if we brought back the farm distillery.