Ok, after a recent trip on the west coast trail, I decided that I would use one of my smuggled bottles of everclear as stove fuel on the trail - So, basically I was using Ethanol to fuel my stove - Same thing as "Denatured Alcohol" - but without the stuff to make it undrinkable - To me it was simple, as the stove fuel became "dual use" and the excess was consumed as a warm-me-up in a nice pot of pepperrmint tea on a couple of occasions.

I normally fuel my stove on Methanol (methyl hydrate - heet, gas line anti-freeze, etc) and figured there'd be no noticable difference - I was wrong!

Normally, until I get down to around the freezing mark, I don't worry too much about my stove fuel being too cold to light up - The WCT was nowhere near freezing, maybe 10C at night- balmy.

However, retrieving my bag in the morning from the bear box *three times* had my stove not getting hot enough to go! and it was WARM out! just doing my usual prime and go routine. After the first time I thought - something must be wrong here.. Sure enough, it was!

Methanol boils at 64 Centigrade
Ethanol boils at 78 Centigrade

Duh. Chemistry to the rescue. - probably slightly compounded by the fact that I was at sea level instead of my typical 1200+meters.

Anyway, I didn't think I'd notice the difference, but I sure did notice those 12 degrees! While the "dual use" aspect of the everclear was kind of nice, it really didn't warrant the harder starts - and I didn't really carry that much "excess". Anyway, I'm surely back on pure methanol for stove fuel - much easier to get going.