Interesting. >Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 02:07:16 +0000 >From: Bill Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: "Homestead mailing list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Ethanol From Roots > >Lately I've been growing kefir culture on inulin-containing roots like >yacon, with the goal of producing distilled ethanol. > >Kefir could be called "sourdough of milk" since it's the same sort of >thing, a mixture of yeast and bacteria. Kefir yeast don't especially >like starch, like Saccharomyces, but instead specialize in lactose. It >turns out they're also great at digesting at inulin, the starch-like >polymer of fructose that occurs in the roots of virtually all the >members of the sunflower family: chicory, jerusalem artichoke, salsify, >dandelion, elecampane, yacon, etc. > >The main challenge in producing ethanol is not to use more energy in >processing than can be obtained from the resulting fuel. Using kefir >yeast allows you to omit the long baking step that's required to make, >say, tequila from the agave, another inulin producer. It may be no good >for flavor, but fine for distillation into fuel. > >The next main problem is how to pay for all those little packets of >yeast. And where the heck do I buy "Kluyvermyces marxianus"? Just >recently I adapted the hop yeast technique for purifying kefir yeast. >It all works exactly the same way. I made a batch of hop yacon kefir a >few weeks ago, but I was too busy to do much experimenting. That was >before I harvested yacon, so it was canned, hydrolyzed yacon (which even >wine yeast take to). Last night I recreated the kefir culture just as I >did for the sourdough, buy mixing some old hop yacon kefir and and sour >yacon kefir into a new batch of pureed yacon. As of this morning, the >new yacon kefir smells perfectly normal, as does the sourdough. > >The only remaining question is whether certain organic compounds in >plants like elecampane will inhibit yeast growth. > >The last step that used to stand in the way to the ethanol revolution >was the repeated distillation. Once again, the challenge is not to use >too much energy. Solar distillation is quite easy, but it's difficult >to control the amount of water that also distills out. Enter the >zeolite filter. Zeolite filters can easily separate water and ethanol, >producing a 199 proof product on the first run.
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