Could we make a flammable liquid (biofuel) just from stuff laying around on the ground? We decided to try it and see.
There are a number of apple trees in the area that dropped a lot of fruit after a recent round of windy days. We collected two buckets of these and smashed them with a sledge hammer and pole of PVC tubing. We added boiling water to the goop but we didn't wash them. If we were planning on drinking this (which we are not) we would have needed to worry a lot more about cleaning things (apple, bug, and bird turd wine, anyone?)
After it was sort of disgusting chunky apple sauce we filtered out the chunks and threw them in the compost.
We had made up a mixture of bread yeast, sugar and warm water and let it grow for a few days. We added this to the liquid from the apples, stired and left it outside in a bucket with a board on top.
After a day or so it still smelled like bread.
After three days it smelled weird and there were lots of flies in the bucket. We shooed them out.
After six days there were some new flies, but not as many as there had been at three days.
After 7 days, we suspected that the ethanol was fully fermented, so we had to filter it. We first put it through a sive, to get the big chunks out, second we put the liquid through several coffee filters to get the smaller chunks out. After all of that we put it in a distiller, to get the water out.
Spoiler alert: It didn't work. :(
Well, it probably worked but the fermentation probably wasn't really finished
The still works by boiling a mixture of liguids slowly so the liquid with the lowest boiling point boils off first, followed by the next one, until whatever has the highest boiling point (or doesn't boil at all) is left behind.
It runs the gasses that boil off through a tube (called the condenser) that has another bigger tube around it that you run cold water through. This turns the gasses back into a liquid, which then collects in a round bottom flask. We set the collection flask in a bowl of ice water to make sure it stayed cold.
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