Distilling Alcohol. I wasn't of age at the time, actually was still in high school, and had a hard time getting alcohol, so I decided to make it my self.
Designed and built a reflux still with embedded temp sensors, a condenser, and one-way air locked gasoline containers for fermentation. I used sugar and yeast to ferment giving me ~10% abv, then ran it through the still 5-6 times to get ~90% abv... it was rocket fuel. I also sent the final samples to a chem student I knew to test for methanol as a precaution. Finally filtered several times through activated carbon to get any final impurities out.
It was the best vodka I've ever had so far, no burn and extremely pure ethanol. I only made a handful of batches before the excitement of it ran out.
Any kid smart enough to distill his own booze and smart enough to check it for the "makes you go blind" part (using a method other than the friends at a party test) should be exempt from the "drinking age" requirement.
That's incredible - friend of mine and I did exactly that, but in Australia rather than Texas.
We rather over-specced the reflux column (it was about 1m tall, copper, and ran a water jacket pumped from a swimming pool) and we even asked a friend to put samples thru a mass spectrometer to make sure we weren't drinking methanol.
Never thought of it as a hack though, just a cheap way to get booze.
We flavoured it with oak chips and watered it down. Great hackers think alike? :)
Distilling Alcohol. I wasn't of age at the time, actually was still in high school, and had a hard time getting alcohol, so I decided to make it my self.
Designed and built a reflux still with embedded temp sensors, a condenser, and one-way air locked gasoline containers for fermentation. I used sugar and yeast to ferment giving me ~10% abv, then ran it through the still 5-6 times to get ~90% abv... it was rocket fuel. I also sent the final samples to a chem student I knew to test for methanol as a precaution. Finally filtered several times through activated carbon to get any final impurities out.
It was the best vodka I've ever had so far, no burn and extremely pure ethanol. I only made a handful of batches before the excitement of it ran out.