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Actually you only need 1 yeast cell - those suckers grow. It's just that one cell would take awhile to multiply. Sugar beets or sugar cane would be better than corn for making ethanol.

Thats what Brazil uses; Sugar Cane. I was watching an episode of some travel show and they literally took sugar cane, ran it through a manual wheel press to extract the juice from it. Then through a couple of layers of cheese cloth to filter out the bits. Then put poured the filtered juice into a beaker and boiled it. Collecting the vapor in another beaker. Once they had about a liter or so in the "collector" beaker, then poured it into the gas tank of a VW bug and drove off. This was all done in the course of a an hour or so. Now it did require them to juice alot of cane, and boil several beakers of juice to get enough in the collector beaker. Nothing fancy, and they didn't appear to wait for anything to ferment.

The reason for the corn? It's cheaper to produce domestically than importing sugar. Hence why all the cola companies switched over to high fructose corn-syrup instead of real sugar for their sweetener in the 70s.

Quote:

History of North American whisky
production
Whisky production began in the US in 1733
when the British government passed the
Molasses Act. Until that time, the colonists
produced distilled spirits from molasses. The
Molasses Act imposed a duty on molasses of
non-British origin. Since the American colonists
imported most of their molasses from the French
and Spanish islands, they were greatly concerned.
Since non-British molasses was cheaper and
more abundant, smuggling and ignoring the
Molasses Act (and the later Sugar Act) was the
basis for much of the .Spirit of .76..
Pre-revolution grain whisky production was
small; although history notes that settlers in
western Maryland and Pennsylvania produced
rye whisky from their abundant rye grain crops
and that rye whisky began to replace the popular
molasses-based rums. After the Revolution, the
Embargo Act cut off the supply of molasses; and
with abolition of the slave trade by the new
Congress, both molasses and slaves were
smuggled into the US. These events increased
the cost of molasses and accelerated the decline
of rum.
The westward migration
Early settlers crossing the Allegheny Mountains
included many Scots and Irish immigrants who
were grain farmers and distillers with knowledge
of pot still operation from their homelands. They
produced the rye whisky that became the first
.American. whisky. When Alexander Hamilton
needed money to pay the debts incurred during
the American Revolution, he pushed an excise
tax levied on distilled spirits through Congress.
As news of the tax spread, the uproar and public
outrage was so intense that President
Washington sent 13,000 troops into western
Pennsylvania to quell the .Whisky Rebellion.. As
the troops entered from the east, many farmerdistillers
packed their stills and headed west to
Kentucky to avoid both the tax and the army.
The farmers found Kentucky soils not as
suitable for rye and wheat crops as soils in
Pennsylvania and Maryland. They discovered
that corn was much easier to cultivate. The first
writing that expounded on corn growing in
Kentucky comes from the Jesuit Hierosm
Lalemont. He noted .to mention the Indian Corn
only, it puts forth a stalk of such extraordinary
thickness and height that one could take it for a
tree, while it bears ears two feet long with grains
that resemble in size our large Muscatel grapes.
(Carson, 1963).
Whisky production grew rapidly in the early
frontier areas as the settlers found in whisky a
means of moving grain to market. A pack horse
could carry only four bushels of corn, rye or
wheat; but that same horse could carry 24
bushels of grain that had been mashed and
distilled into two kegs of whisky. Also, the price
of whisky was more than double the price the
farmer could get for grain.

The current Ethanol NATIONAL controversy has been surrounded by CORN production/suply/demand. I contend that the controversy is not a matter of corn ONLY but should also include sugar (or some form of sugar) production/supply/demand.

Hello:
Excuse me but the discussion is about putting alcohol in our cars, not drinking it.

Al Gore now finally admits that the benefits of ethanol are "trivial" and that he pushed massive subsidies only to buy votes from special interests. And recent scientific studies suggest that carbon emissions from biofuels (ethanol) will increase 80% to 165% over fossil fuels.

With this evidence we should be talking about how to eliminate ethanol in our fuel system.

SOmeone writes:
"With this evidence we should be talking about how to eliminate ethanol in our fuel system."

Yes. Agreed. But Al Gore is not the ONLY evidence. There are technical issues too and that's why i brought up the issue of SUGAR DEMAND which heretofore i have never heard mentioned in ANY circles.

Evidence is not just politcal. It's Technical also.
If anyone wants political evidence only then just take a look at the following map. Explains it all:

http://www.lukecole.com/Electoral%20Maps/Maps10.htm

Quote:

Pardon the digression, but the history of turning corn into cash has some parallels with ethanol fuels. I believe it will take more than the collector car hobby to fight the Ag lobby. If we could get the environmental crowd to join in something might be accomplished.

I've read that when you consider the petro used in farm tractors, fertilizers, refining processes and transportation, it takes about 1.2 gallons of petro to produce 1 gallon of ethanol fuel....hardly friendly to the environment.

You are right about the ag lobby. It is quite powerful, although they don't get all they want. Just look at the fight between the environmental groups and the ag industry over water in the western states. In this area, pretty much so far the score is environment (fish) 1, population centers (LA metro) 1, ag 0. As a result, countless acres of once productive farm land is dry -- but not to worry, the govt had paid many of the corporate farms not to grow anything there anyway to keep prices up. For those farms that went under, their output is now made up by imports from south of the border.

As to ethanol, I still believe it is here to stay but it can be made more efficiently with other crops. Just look at Brazil.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil Granted, we don't have millions of acres where sugar cane will grow but there will be something that hopefully won't take prime land to grow on. Another poster had earlier mentioned some kind of grass that grows wild and abundantly in the midwest that is getting a serious look.

Once gasoline hits $$$ a gallon, it will be amazing how much comes out of the woodwork. Just like the so called natural gas shortage several years ago that miraculously disappeared overnight when the price jumped sky high.

Good points Howard, I live in the Northern San Joaquin Valley but I used to travel quite a bit on business to the Fresno area. It amazed me to see thousands of acres of water intensive cotton growing in a semi-desert climate...a crop better suited to the deep South. I agree that the farmers around here have been shut out of the equation re water rights, but partly due to their poor choice of crops and water utilization.

It really chapped me during the drought of the 80's to see my lawn turn brown while I saw over watering (with Norcal water) flooding the street gutters in LA where there was no rationing.

I think the other poster was referring to saw grass or prairie grass which grows abundantly without irrigation in the Midwest. Of course the corn farmers in Iowa and their lobbyists wouldn't profit from that.

Ethanol or no ethanol, flex fuels or no flex fuels, just gas or no gas. I don;t really care personally. My view point is to establish somekind of standard and STAY with it for at least 20 years.

Constantly changing creates nothing but high cost and confusion. Persanally, i vote for just plain gasoline like we used for many decades. If it quadruples to even $12.00/gallon so what????? Will anyone really stop using it???? I doubt it.

Bottom line: U can live in car. But u can't drive a house.