FREE BEER!?!?!!!
Yep. If you add up all the costs of the ingredients for making a batch of great home brewed craft beer in the most economical manner possible, the value of the CO2 produced by fermentation can be about equal to the cost of the beer {sans labor, of course), if you happen to have a high-tech grow room or greenhouse with a co2 sensor system.
So if you have a grow room or greenhouse that uses co2 tanks to enhance the growing atmosphere, measures and enhances the co2 in the air with a sniffer / sensor rig, and are paying about $35 or $40 or more for a 20 lb tank refill, co2 is costing about two bucks a pound. If you harvest and propagate your own yeast, and full-grain brew from good domestic malt, a five gallon batch of fine home brew can cost about ten bucks, and produce 5 or 6 lbs of co2
The fermentation tank can be put into a closet or room adjacent to the grow room, (or in the grow room if the temperature is kept around 70) and the co2 vented into the grow room thru a plastic tube coming from the fermentation lock.
This is a pretty inefficient method for primary co2 production compared to tanks or gas generators, but it can certainly help. The co2 from 5 gallons of beer could do a good bit of good in a small grow tent, especially with a closed system and a small dehumidifier.
But a high-tech grow room or greenhouse with co2 injection or generation is where to get benefit from all the co2 that the beer makes if the system uses a sniffer /sensor to determine the co2 levels in the room or greenhouse. The constantly bubbling beer fermentation puts its magic gases into the air, lowering the amount of time the co2 solenoid is open, and lessening the amount of purchased co2 released by the tank or generator.
Speaking of Free Beer, that was the name of a rock band that played the dive bar circuit around San Francisco in the early seventies. The band’s music wasn’t anything special, but they were locally popular for about a year.
They would heavily flyer the city with the posters that said “Free Beer”, the name of the bar, and the time and date of their show. People would show up, pay the cover charge, order a beer, and be told “the beer ain’t free … that’s the name of the band”.
Here’s an interesting afterthought:
In 1966 and 67 or so I lived in the Lower East Side in NYC several times, while also living in San Francisco. A student standby airline ticket cost $76.18 and many people flew back and forth many times. A kilo of weed cost $80 on Haight Street, and a small shot glass full constituted a righteous New York nickel bag. And while everyone in SF had vast amounts of cheap marijuana, everybody in New York constantly wanted it.
I knew a guy back then and there who was into meditation and spiritual development – like most everybody at the time – who developed what he called “Bonga Yoga”. He combined Eastern breathing exercises with bonging cannabis and DMT.
The DMT back then wasn’t like the organic DMT that is around today; we didn’t even know that real DMT could be found in the organic sources that are being used currently. The DMT was synthetic, Xtreeeeeemly powerful, either crystalline or a beige wax or soaked into parsley. One good hit was like tens of thousands of micrograms of LSD … for about 20 minutes. Even though the dosage and experience was beyond intense, nobody ever had a bad trip because after smoking the DMT, you were so far from your body, mind, consciousness, and ego that there was nothing left to freak; a negative experience became virtually impossible.
So “Bonga Yoga” consisted of deep breathing exercises wherein the smoker visualizes the inhale bringing goodness into the body, and the exhale removing physical and spiritual toxins. Ten continuous bong hits (load the next hit while holding in the previous one) followed by a hit of about 50 to 100 mg. of DMT from a pre-packed pipe. Wow!
Lots of growers smoke in their grow room occasionally. Have a few good bong hits then do some breathing yoga while watching the CO2 monitor. Inhale the good … exhale the toxic. Do it hard and fast in giant breaths while sitting straight and upright, sitting about 5 or more feet from the CO2 monitor, and watch the gauge as you inhale oxygen and exhale CO2. If you work at it … in a closed environment growroom … you can get damn high by doing yogic breathing in an attempt to raise the CO2 levels two or three hundred points as a human CO2 generator. Be careful. You might get so high you fall off the chair.
And I’ll end this loosely linked rambling stream-of-consciousness with an almost free source of ethanol: take a gallon of gasoline, add 12 ounces of water in a big sep funnel of some sort, watch the layers separate, and drain off the clear layer at the bottom. What will you get? 24 ounces of 100 proof ethanol! And you can then pour the gasoline right back into your tank.
The government requires industrial ethanol distillers to denature the alcohol before it leaves the distillery by adding any number of poisonous additives to make it undrinkable. Most, if not all gasohol distillers, denature their alcohol with gasoline … which is probably the easiest additive to remove.
Don’t drink it … at least until you get it lab tested. But, unless they denature it with a poison other than gasoline, I’ll bet that real high quality vodka could be made this easily from today’s gasoline … at about 25 cents a quart. We’re I a hard working moonshiner back in West Virginny realizing about $100 for a gallon of 100 proof ‘shine, I would certainly check this out.
And by “high quality”, industrial alcohol for gasoline mixing is made in a steam powered reflux column still. Much of the alcohol is distilled 50 times as it goes thru the still, leaving most or all of the unwanteds in the slops that exit the bottom of the column.