Head for the Jack Daniels distillery in south-central Tennessee and drive on another five miles. You'll come across a possible solution for high gasoline prices: your own, personal moonshine distillery from Dogwood Energy.

At a time when adventurous souls are burning compressed natural gas, gasohol, E85, and in place of diesel fuel, even used deep-fryer oil from McDonald's—yes, it smells like fries—moonshine isn't such an outlandish proposition. Here's the deal, and here's why it's legal.

Genuine Kentucky moonshine is 190-proof (95 percent pure) ethanol, made from fermenting starchy crops such as corn, apples, and sugarcane. Archer Daniels Midland does the same thing (turns corn into ethanol) but on a grander scale, and with more lobbyists. You need a federal permit from the U.S. Tax and Tobacco Bureau to distill small amounts of ethanol, also called grain alcohol, and you're on your honor that you'll add some kind of poison so it won't be drinkable; otherwise, your brew might end up in an adults-only fruit smoothie. And you'd be depriving the government of badly needed tax revenue.

Dogwood Energy estimates that you can home-distill a gallon of moonshine—er, alternative fuel—for about 75 cents, although at various places on the site, the cost is pegged at anywhere from 65 cents to $1.25 a gallon. If ethanol costs 75 cents a gallon and gasoline costs $3 a gallon, a mix of 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline would be the equivalent of $2.40 a gallon gasoline. An 85 percent ethanol mix (E85) would cost $1.09 a gallon.

The company says it's now making four or five stills a day and has sold 125 stills since last fall. "For the most part," the company says, "[making grain alcohol] is no more dangerous than using a pressure cooker on a gas stove." A still capable of producing five gallons an hour costs $1,465; plans to build your own are $33.

Most cars work fine with a mix of up to 15 percent ethanol; to user higher concentrations, you need a car that's rated for flex-fuels or E85. And older cars with rubber fittings in the fuel line may have problems, because the ethanol attacks and decays the fittings.