In a conversation with Julian Darley, he mentioned that his experiments with making ethanol were far from satisfactory, too. I didn't ask what the exact problems were, though. What did you find during your experimentation?

aangel,

The main issue we had was scaling things up to quantities required for keeping the car's fuel tank full. It's one thing to produce a few liters of moonshine quite another to produce 40 or 50 liters of pure ethanol in your kitchen from fermented tropical fruit every week. Also it was a lot easier to just buy the finished product at the local gas station. It certainly wasn't cost effective to produce it at home. We just did it to see if we could.