Coleman latern fuel:laugh:
Depends what you are making and process.
Where I live corn is not a common crop.
Barely, wheat and rye are.
Rye and Barley make good mash.
Rye grows good and produces a nice hard starchy kernle and 2 row barley has more enzimes than required when malted correctly so you can use up a lot of cheaper Rye and add the two row only as needed to react the starches if you need some help.
This gives you a lot of wiggle room....
You can even use wheat cooked as an adjunct.
Starch to sugar conversion.
Temperature sensative step.
You want to make short simple sugars for ease of fermentation.
The longer chains make better flavours ( more on this later ).
Fermantation, depends on the SG of the mash and types of yeast used.
Since this is an autum practive up here you may want to use a strain of yeast thats better at cold temperature ( a lager yeast for example will continue to work at low temperature where a wine or ale yeast will stop and go to sleep ).
Yeast selection will impart flavours in your mash too.
Warmer buisy yeasts are more buttery tasting.
Distilation
Columb still.....
Its 2014 get with the times man!
Blending aging.
This is where the long chain sugars in the malts come into play, also roasting grains to make crystal malts will produce sweater richer tasting products Wiskeys to be more specific
Aging.
French Oak....
This can be done in glass using chips if you want o try and hide what it is your doing as a home brew beer opperation, but your giong to want to allow some air in wo air locks are not used, but rather a loose cork bung.
Barrles are prefered because they can be chared and breath correctly for the right kid of aging.
Vodka is completely different.....
This is something you distill to high purity.
The whole point is not to have any flavour at all!
Rice can often be used to add starches to the mash.
You can buy man made enzimes that force the creation of small chain sugars for better fermentation.
All of this however is pure speculation on my part.
Home distilation is against the law and I only dable in a bit of beer or wine now and then.
Lanterns and lamps have been manufactured to run on ethanol.
Mostly found in Nordic countries where they are a highly collectable thing these days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dROpVxy3FGo