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School was usually challenging for me because I would have rather been somewhere else drawing, building, playing with computers, reading technical manuals, riding my bike, or exploring the world. I remember most of my teachers through the years and a small number of them stand out in my mind because of their ability to educate in a way that drew me in and made me want to learn. In high school, Tom Irwin was one of these rare teachers and he often wove personal stories into his lectures about history. That is what made his lessons interesting. I wish I could look back in time and hear him talk again because I have no doubt there was more between the lines than the typical high school kid would pick up on. During one lecture Mr. Irwin made a quick reference about a time when he and his brother got in trouble when their mother found a balloon-topped bottle in the top of their closet. He said little more than this and his lecture continued on. I don’t know how the balloon bottle incident related to history, but surely there was a tie in. The balloon and bottle reference caught my attention and after class I waited until most of the students had exited the classroom so I could ask Mr. Irwin to elaborate. With a straight face, he simply said that he and his brother would mix bread yeast, water, and sugar in a clean bottle, put a balloon on top, and let it ferment. The balloon provided a space for the carbon dioxide to expand into without letting air into the bottle and prevented any possibility of exploding bottles. He said nothing about alcohol or drinking the mixture. I suspect that he knew I would figure that out since I had taken the time to ask him about it. I grew up in the kitchen and by the time I was in high school I was comfortable cooking a variety of things. I was very familiar with bread making and the use of yeast in baking. Not long after Mr. Irwin’s lecture, I had my own mixture fermenting in the dark. I wasn’t interested in the alcohol but was interested in the process. Of course the mixture tasted horrible. I tried doctoring it with various flavorings, but that made no improvement. Also at the time, chemistry class was teaching us about the process of distillation. It was obvious that the bread yeast and sugar mixture needed to be distilled after it had fermented. This would remove the impurities from the alcohol and result in a more pure product. Again, the interest here was the process and the technology. After spending some time fabricating the parts over several weeks, I had a working still. The problem was finding a suitable place to operate it. After a failed attempt run it in the back of my truck parked in a remote location, we would run the still at my friend Mark’s house. Mark’s bedroom was a second-story room that had a long cavernous closet that was formerly just attic space. We would hang the still from the clothes rod and operate it for 1 or 2 hours after school. The still was compact enough that it could be concealed to a certain extent if needed. We even had a fire extinguisher standing by in case of fire. All of this was long before the widespread use of the Internet, and I felt like a pioneer making a working process out of bare knowledge. The still worked, but in retrospect wasn’t a marvel of efficiency. The coils of the still were housed in chilled water bath. At one point there was a small fuel pump from a remote control model airplane that circulated the water to and from an ice container because the chilling water would quickly become warm. I never did experiment with an air-cooled still. |
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| Wednesday, August 20, 2008 |
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