- Name Chris Myles
- Age 51
- Vocation A chronic volunteer,
he’s studying to become a paramedic and makes homemade
classic guitars. - Known for Attempting to distill homebrewed ethanol
- On what
brought him to Silverton “The blue skies
here are like nothing I’d ever seen before. You get clear
days in the Midwest but there is always a little haze in the air.
This is the freshest air in the continuous 48. And, I can’t
drink the water in St. Louis (his hometown) anymore; I may as well
be drinking ethanol. I’ve become a bit of a snob.” - He says “It never
crossed my mind to try and save a lot of money off this project. In
fact, I’ll probably lose money and just chalk it up to a
hobby. I think the first step is people making it in the backyard
if we are going to do this. We can’t depend on Exxon and ADM
because they still have a lot of oil to sell.”
Tucked up against a snow-covered hillside in a grove of aspen
trees, Chris Myles’ Silverton, Colo., home is a strange
combination of mountain retreat and auto shop. The view from the
front porch is dominated by 13,000-foot Kendall Mountain. Along the
street are three Saab cars, a Dodge pickup, a BMW motorcycle and
what looks like a taxi on steroids — a New York City cab made
mountain-ready by putting it on a truck chassis.
Before
winter’s end, Myles hopes that at least some of these
vehicles will be powered by ethanol, or grain alcohol. But he has
no intention of relying on the 100 or so ethanol bio-refineries
currently operating in the United States. A slender man with wispy
grey hair poking out from under the edges of his cap, Myles plans
to make his own ethanol, moonshine-style.
This
self-described “sixties left-winger” first heard about
ethanol during the oil crisis of the late ’70s. But it
wasn’t until gasoline prices recently shot up again that he
decided to try to brew ethanol himself. He ordered plans off the
Internet for $20, then spent $350 on materials — mostly
copper pipe. Then he spent some “$9 million worth of my own
labor” fashioning the still.
For now, the
almost-6-foot-tall still — a compact copper column with
several protruding spouts — sits against a table in his
workshop. Eventually, the mash — a mixture of corn, water and
yeast — will be heated in a 50-gallon drum connected to the
still by hoses. The final location of the contraption is still in
doubt, however, thanks in part to Silverton’s severe climate.
“I was dumb enough to think the hardest part would
be putting the still together,” says Myles, his voice picking
up speed and volume. “But I overlooked the fact that I live
in a place that — for months at a time — it
doesn’t get above freezing. When I was envisioning this in my
mind, it was always me doing this out in my driveway.”
But as winter set in, the search for a warmer location
began. Myles is considering using one bay of his garage, where two
partially disassembled cars now sit. He’d like to save energy
and effort by cooking the mash in the same wood-burning stove that
heats his house. But that would require upgrading his stove, which
currently sits in the shop where he does woodworking and makes
furniture and guitars.
Wherever the still ends up, Myles
looks forward to using his first batch of the finished product:
198-proof ethanol. He hopes to make enough fuel to get him over the
mountain roads to Durango for the weekly paramedic classes
he’s taking. That will require about 27 gallons per week, or
about nine hours of distilling, although over time, he hopes to
make the process more efficient. Myles adds that he has no
intention of sampling anything from his still: “There is a
reason moonshine was called rotgut whiskey.”
Unwittingly, Myles has joined a sort of homegrown fuel-making
revolution. It took three months for the federal Alcohol and
Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau to process his distilling permit
because the agency has been overwhelmed by similar applications
— it has issued some 1,500 permits to small-production
ethanol distillers. That’s heartening to Myles, who hopes to
inspire others not only to be independent from foreign oil, but
also from giant ethanol-producing corporations.
“I’ve always been a compulsive volunteer,” Myles
says, scratching his white chin stubble. “Show me a good
cause and I’ll jump right in. I saw the oil crisis as a
problem that wasn’t going away. So I said to myself,
‘OK, get off your ass.’ So now I want to spread the
word about how to do this.”
The author, a
former HCN intern, now writes from Denver, Colorado.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Fill ‘er up with moonshine.
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