The Gregor Tartan

“Gather round you whiskey drinkers, we will never be for long.
We will always have the comfort of our friend John Barley Corn.”

Well, it appears that the Scottish drinking song is right.  We will always have the comfort of our friend John Barley Corn.  Even when behind the wheel, apparently.  Though probably not in the way you’re thinking.

Some Scots geniuses (that’s redundant) at Edinburgh Napier University in their Biofuel Research Center have come up with a way to use the leftovers from whiskey making (not the Little Goldie itself, thank God) to make butanol for fuel.  As anyone who’s read my rants on corn ethanol knows, butanol is a true gasoline replacement (being about 94% equal in BTUs).

So anyway, back to the scotch. A byproduct of the filtration process to pull the grains and so forth from the Juice O the Barley is called pot ale.  Since, of course, true Scotsmen don’t drink pale beer, this isn’t the same as your trendy little swill from the local pub.  It probably tastes better, though.

This pale ale still has a fair amount of potency in the way of bio-matter and sugars.  So it can be further distilled into butanol (becoming biobutanol) and used as fuel.  How cool is that?

I found out about all this from Caroline McCarthy at CNet (I’m pretty sure she’s Irish, but she lives in Manhattan, so it doesn’t count in her favor.)  Then I saw a total ripoff of her title on AutoBlogGreen.  Nice picture of some caskets on his header, though.  At least he got that right, though I’m not sure those aren’t Tennessee whiskey barrels rather than proper scotch kegs.

Oh and Scots never say “cheers” when they drink.  That’s a pansy-ass French and English thing.  Proper Scotsmen say things like “Do I get to kill the English?” and “So you’d like to know what’s under the kilt, eh?”

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