Unfortunately, you still can’t have any of those things (although the Nikes did appear on eBay, briefly, and sold for $1300 US), but maybe you can have something better:  a real, honest-to-goodness Mr. Fusion!

The “Mr. Fusion” reactor mounted to the back of Back to the Future’s famous DeLorean hovercar produced the car’s fuel by extracting chemical energy from common household garbage.  While the 1985 movie version of Mr. Fusion put out enough power to juice the good Doctor Brown’s flux capacitor all the way to the year 2015, the 2008 version will probably only get a few miles down the road.

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Who’s thirsty?

Between the barbecues, national holidays and beach vacations, cold beers become a necessity in many households over the summer months. As we pay more attention to the way our food is grown, harvested and transported, perhaps we owe it to the environment to be as vigilant with our beer. But how easy is it to find environmentally-conscientious breweries?

Beer brewing is not the most environmentally-friendly of activities, particularly regarding water usage. On average, six gallons of water are required to brew one gallon of beer - a ratio that must be drastically reduced in dry areas. Wastewater, carbon emissions and huge energy generators also contribute to the environmental sins of the industry.

But more breweries are taking notice of the eating public’s environmental awakening. While the biggest multinational breweries are beginning to make structural changes that promote sustainability, most of the greenest beers are (unsurprisingly) local and regional ones. Microbreweries are great agents of change because they interact with the communities that surround them. Their smaller size and community feeling make them more amenable to change, so it is easier to petition them and request more sustainable practices. Below are the top five eco-minded, North American mid-sized breweries:

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Before you get too excited, please note that the unit is probably too expensive for your next block party, unless you’ve got an extra $9,995 lying around somewhere. Fortunately, state and Federal tax credits can halve this, but that still keeps it out of the price range of the average American.

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Most of us are at least vaguely familiar with biodiesel, but how much do we really know?

While biodiesel is easily the most popular alternative fuel available, it’s commonly misunderstood or misrepresented by inaccurate information. Since the most frequent question I get is, “So what exactly is biodiesel, anyway?“, I decided to write a tome covering all the basics—a one stop shop for all your biodiesel- related questions.

It’s been exactly one year since I published the first Biodiesel Mythbuster on GreenOptions.com, and its popularity made a sequel inevitable. By way of a short introduction, here’s what I wrote last year:

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While this is a good general introduction to homebrewing biodiesel, I have to repeat the disclaimer I made earlier (see 6 Ways To Find And Use Biodiesel Anywhere - Part II): before attempting this on your own it’s important to do your homework. Don’t trust it just because you’ve seen someone do it. Most of these videos don’t discuss the specifics of making biodiesel, and for that I would recommend a solid resource (also see the link just above): Biodiesel, Basics And Beyond: A Comprehensive Guide to Production And Use for the Home And Farm.

You’ll notice a lot of these videos utilize a homemade biodiesel reactor called the “appleseed” reactor. This is the simplest and cheapest way to build a biodiesel processing facility in your garage. The plans for it can be found here.

Number 1: Guy Makes Biodiesel In His Kitchen

I can’t believe his mother lets him do this in the kitchen, and where are his gloves?! (I have a particular affiliation for the video, though, since I had the same old truck.)

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Making beer is not very different than making bread - except bread goggles can get you in a lot less trouble! You’ll need a little yeast and a lot of patience, as well as the proper cooking gadgets. You can find ingredients, gadgets, and recipes for your favorite beers online or at your neighborhood brew shop.

Now here’s where your environmental prowess comes into play. Instead of recycling or (don’t even think about it) tossing away your bottle after you finish your beer, save the bottle in a cupboard or under your sink. When you have about 70 (12-ounce/135-mL) bottles stashed away, you can begin the beer-making process. Once you begin making your own beer, you will never have to buy another new bottle or can again. Instead of beer bottles, you can also use wine bottles, but you’ll want to let beer in these bottles ferment a little bit longer.

Now it should also be mentioned that there are a number of fantastic and high-minded breweries out there. So, you might like to consider buying these 70 bottles (about 12 six-packs) and the beer they contain from companies like Anderson Valley Brewing Company, a large-scale solar powered brewery, or the New Belgium Brewing Company, which has wonderful sustainability and philanthropy programs, and also just introduced its Mothership Organic Wit beer. You probably have other favorite local and organic beers as well.

All in all, the gear that you will need to start brewing is not extensive: a bucket, a 20-quart (19 Liter) cooking pot, a thermometer, a large sealed container, and a few other odds and ends. The cooking pot is probably the most expensive item. Unless you improvise with material that you already have, the cost of the equipment should come to between $80 and $135. You can also generally find this equipment on Craigslist and Freecycle. If you are able to use a bucket or a thermometer that you already have, just make sure that it has been very well cleaned before you begin. I told a brewer once that I’d heard that 70% of good beer making depended on cleanliness and he responded, “Only 70%?”

The best way to brew your first batch of beer is with a kit—not one of the “beer-in-a-can” packages—but simply a collection of pre-measured ingredients for a particular type of beer. You can get one of these at your local brew shop, or at an online site like homebrewers.com. Once you get the feel of things, you can purchase beer-making ingredients from organic retailers, like breworganic.com. If you’re lucky, you may even live near an organic brew shop, co-op, or grocery store that sells bulk organic brewing ingredients. I also recommend the free “home brew class” offered at breworganics.com.

So cheers, prost, cin-cin, skål, kanpai, and salud! Here’s to drinking environmentally responsibly.

References and Resources:

If you are interested in more on this topic, you may also enjoy the following articles written by my fellow Green Options bloggers.

Green Brews: An Ecology of Beer, by Robin Schidlowski

Organic Beer, Now Without That Pesky Organic Part, by Alicia Erickson

Green Brews: Judging Beer at the Corvallis Brewfest, by Clayton Bodie Cornell

Anheuser-Busch Walks The Organic Trail With New Beer, by Michael dEstries

Tip o’ the Day: Green Beer, by Rebecca Carter

Fosters Brewery To Develop Fuel Cell That Runs On Beer, by Michael dEstries

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iantindale/79961379/

Homebrewing biodiesel has many advantages: it usually costs well under $1 a gallon to produce, it eliminates trips to the gas station, and it makes a hell of a hobby.

I've been making biodiesel in my garage for almost two years with equipment that I built myself from instructions available for free online and with used vegetable oil that I pick up for free from a local restaurant. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves. Like most homebrewers, I started my bio-adventure by making small test batches of biodiesel in my kitchen.

Before we go any further, the Green Options legal team has asked me to include a short note about safety:

Almost everything you'll be dealing with when making biodiesel can be very dangerous. You'll be handling hot oil, methanol (which is poisonous and potentially lethal if consumed, if it gets on your skin, or if its vapors are inhaled), and sodium hydroxide (lye, which is poisonous and corrosive if consumed or inhaled, and which will burn your skin quickly and painfully immediately upon contact). Always wear heavy-duty, chemical-proof gloves, eye protection, and a dust mask during every step of the process. With methanol, not even cartridge respirators can protect you from fumes. Always minimize the time that anything containing methanol is unsealed. Literally, hold your breath for the few moments that you're working with open methanol containers. Above all, use common sense.

Biodiesel is simply heated vegetable oil mixed with methoxide (methanol + lye). The lye in the methoxide breaks apart the vegetable oil and allows a methanol molecule to recombine where a glycerin molecule used to be (methanol and glycerin are both alcohols). When the reaction is finished, the darker glycerin settles to the bottom, and the lighter biodiesel is left on top.

Here's what you'll need to make your own test batch at home:

• Safety equipment listed above

• 1 Liter of any virgin, unused vegetable oil (non-hydrogenated!)

• 1 bottle of "Red Devil Lye" drain cleaner, available at most grocery and hardware stores. Red Devil is very close to pure NaOH (sodium hydroxide), and is perfect for making small batches of biodiesel. If you can't find Red Devil, contact a local chemical supply house and ask for sodium hydroxide.

• 1 bottle of "HEET" brand antifreeze (the yellow bottle) available at most auto supply stores. HEET is close to 100% pure methanol. If you can't find it, look for a local racing fuels retailer that sells methanol.

• 1 large sealable glass jar or bottle, like a mason jar (at least 1.5 liters)

• 1 small sealable glass jar or bottle, like a mason jar (at least .5 liters)

• 1 glass (not plastic!) measuring cup (at least 250 mL)

• A scale that measures in grams

• 1 funnel

• 1 thermometer

• 1 paper cupcake wrapper

This "recipe" only works with virgin veggie oil. If you want to try making a batch from used oil, check out the external resources provided below. You'll need to do a titration to determine how much lye to use.

How to make methoxide:

1. First, go outside. You'll want to do this in a well-ventilated area. Measure out 250 mL of methanol (HEET). Pour it into the small glass jar and seal it.
2. Measure out 6 grams of NaOH (Red Devil). Don't let the lye touch anything plastic or anything living, including you. You can use a paper cupcake wrapper on the scale to hold the NaOH if necessary. Lye tends to stick to anything and everything else.
3. Unseal the jar containing the methanol and carefully pour in the NaOH. Re-seal the jar.
4. Gently swirl the jar to dissolve the lye in the methanol. This may take a few minutes. The jar will probably become slightly warmer. This is normal. A small amount of pressure will also be built up. Gently vent this pressure outside by opening the lid, but do not breathe the fumes!
5. Leave the jar outside for now, but not in the sun.

Unwashed Biodiesel (with glycerine removed)How to make biodiesel:

1. Begin by heating the liter of vegetable oil to 140-145 degrees Fahrenheit on the stove or carefully in the microwave.
2. Pour the heated oil into the large glass jar using the funnel if necessary.
3. Take the oil jar and the funnel outside. Carefully but quickly pour the methoxide into the oil jar using the same funnel. Re-seal the jar.
4. After ensuring that the jar is completely sealed, shake the mixture vigorously for 20-25 seconds.
5. Set the jar down in a well-lit area and watch the magic happen!

You'll notice immediately (probably even while you're shaking) that the mixture turns a much darker color than the original oil. This is the dark glycerin molecules being broken off of the original veggie oil molecules by the lye. After just a few minutes, you'll begin seeing the glycerin fall to the bottom of the jar. Within an hour or two, if all went well, all the glycerin should have separated out and you should have two clearly separate layers: dark glycerin on the bottom (20-25% of the volume), and cloudy looking biodiesel on top. Success!

Washed BiodieselCan you run back outside and pour the biodiesel directly into your diesel car or truck? Well, it's probably not a good idea. The reason the biodiesel layer looks cloudy is because there is still some leftover lye and other impurities floating around in there. Though some homebrewers do use this "unwashed" biodiesel, most of us choose to take a few extra steps to "wash" the fuel of all the impurities before putting it in our tanks. You can see the clarity difference in the two images. The reddish unwashed biodiesel above is too cloudy to see the text behind the jar. The washed fuel on the left is almost perfectly clear. (Don't worry about the color difference: they're just two different kinds of vegetable oil.)

If you're ready to learn more about making biodiesel, here are a few of the resources that helped me move from making small test batches to making 30 gallon, road-ready batches in my "Appleseed Biodiesel Reactor", wash tank, and dry tank:

• The Collaborative Biodiesel Tutorial - Everything from building your own processor to using the leftover glycerin to getting restaurants to give you their used oil.

• InfoPop Biodiesel Forums - The greatest and most helpful homebrewers in the world hang out here. If you're planning to become a homebrewer, trust me, you'll need their help.

• Yahoo! Biodiesel Basics Group - More great information and knowledge from experienced homebrewers.

• Green Options Resources: Check out our biodiesel archives, biodiesel in our Green Guide, and our residential biodiesel expert Clayton Bodie Cornell.

• My collection of posts about going biodiesel at The Higher Pie.

Utah Biodiesel Supply photo by Jack Jones, courtesy of Graydon Blair.

How Much Booze in the Beer?

Actual fermentation time was about 16 days. During that time, the yeast population expanded, fed upon all the sugars in the malt, and slowly converted those sugars to alcohol. At this point in the game, we were probably looking at an alcohol content of around 5.0%

The way to tell the alcohol content of your beer for sure is to measure the Final Specific Gravity (FG) of the brew (think back to chemistry class) using a gravityometer. You then enter it into an equation 76.08*(OG-FG)/(1.775-OG), with OG being the Original Specific Gravity, and you should come out with your alcohol content! In this case, our OG was 1.06, and our FG was 1.01, which gave us a Alcohol by Weight percentage of 5.32%. Just right.

Getting Started

The whole bottling process, which is quite exciting, is predicated by a rather dull period of sanitization. This is when you must sanitize all of the bottles you’ve collected over the proceeding two weeks—any remaining bacteria will contaminate the beer and lead to spoilage, or worse, illness. This takes quite a long time (about 2 hours for 48 bottles) and is certainly the most time consuming part of the process.

With sanitization completed, the real bottling began. I started by uncorking the glass container the beer has been brewing in (known as a “carboy”), and pouring in a packet of Corn Sugar. This will stimulate the yeast into production again (now that they have more food), which will in turn give the beer carbonation in the bottle.

The First Taste

After mixing in the sugar, I put in a siphon hose, and I readied my first bottle. In order to get a good flow of beer coming out of the main container, and into the bottles, I had to get a siphon going. So I sucked on the hose… hard. A big mouthful of tasty (if flat) beer later, the hose was spurting into the first bottle. The siphon is controlled by a pressure-release valve on the bottom of the hose, which you can engage by pressing it onto the bottom of the inside of the bottle.

After the bottle was full, I placed an uncompressed (somewhat flattened) cap onto the top, and used a capper clamp to seal it into place. The first bottle was completed! Success! However in my joy of capping, I had placed the siphon hose carelessly, and lost my siphon. So I had to take another big suck on the hose to get the siphon going. Mmm… sweet, flat beer filled my mouth, and then it filled another bottle.

Several More Tastes

This process repeated itself over the next hour. While I became more adept at keeping the siphon going between bottles, I had to do the hose suck routine many more times. Spillage was inevitable (when I overfilled a bottle or sucked too much beer into my mouth), and by the time my partner got home, she found my sitting on the floor, sticky with beer and surrounded by bottles, glassy eyed and satisfied. She helped me bottle the last few, and to clean up before I went promptly to bed.

The final test will be in two more weeks, when the first bottle will be opened, and we can relish in our success (or commiserate in our failure). Either way, homebrewing has been quite a process, and I’m already looking forward to my next batch (particularly to bottling my next batch!).

We started by selecting our ingredients. While in the name of expediency, we went to a standard brewery supply place, I’d highly recommend checking out the Seven Bridges Co-op. They are the largest (and possibly the only) organic brewing supplier on the net, and they have a tremendous amount of resources on their website, including detailed instructions. Anyway, the ingredients you need are relatively simple: barley malt, hops, yeast, and water.

We decided to try doing a Stout, and so we got the proper types of malt and hops (brewing supply houses will be able to tell you what combinations of ingredients will produce your desired results). The actual preparation is relatively easy: you put your barley malt in a mesh bag and boil it for 30 minutes- kind of like a gigantic tea bag- and then add hops and the malt extract and keep it boiling for an hour or so.

After this process is over comes the yeast. The yeast is perhaps the most crucial ingredient in turning your wort (the hops/malt/water mixture) into beer. First, you have to allow the wort to cool, so as not to harm the little yeasties, and then you “pitch” the yeast, which merely means putting it in the container with the wort. The yeast then initiates a surge of reactions: it converts sugar into alcohol, and with such an abundance of sugar (provided by the malt), it undergoes a population explosion.

Of course, as I learned the hard way, if temperature in your slowly brewing beer is too high (78 degrees or higher) the yeast will quite literally explode, spewing out the top of your container and all over the ceiling, floor, and countertop. I arrived home one day after work to find a virtual geyser of foam bursting several feet into the air. We’ll see how this affects the beer.

I’ll post an update in a couple of weeks, after bottling and further fermentation. If all goes well, we'll have 2 cases of tasty stout. If not, we'll have 2 cases of sweet bitter water. Either way, a learning experience, and another step forward in simplifying my food supply.