Here's something many people would love to do. Make your own fuel in your back yard for a buck a gallon. Now you can, thanks to one inventor in California.

Down the drain - that's where most leftover beer and wine at restaurants and bars usually ends up. But for one week the popular Los Gatos Brewing Company did something different.

Owner Jim Stump said, ”We had buckets in the bar and containers in the kitchen and we would pour the leftover beer and wine into the container and in the brewhouse we'd collect the leftover beer."

They collected the alcohol for e-fuel, a company that says it's developed the world's first home ethanol system. After just four days. "We collected 120 gallons of leftover alcohol and beer," he said.

And e-fuel turned about 12% of it into ethanol. Restaurant owners aren't the only ones to benefit. "Instead of paying four bucks a gallon at the pump, you could make ethanol in your own backyard for about a dollar a gallon," he said.

All by using this machine: the microfueler. You fill the fermentation tank with a cocktail of sugar, yeast, and yeast nutrients. It's then mixed with water and the yeast consumes the sugar and converts it to ethanol. That ethanol becomes a vapor and this membrane helps convert the ethanol back into fuel grade liquid fuel you can use.

E-Fuel Founder Tom Quinn said, "By utilizing sugar, the most plentiful feed stock, we can break dependency on oil and reduce our carbon footprint."

But the microfueler is not cheap. It costs about ten-thousand dollars, although substantial rebates are available. Restaurant owner Jim Stump is intrigued by the idea and he says he would consider it - if it were cost effective.

E-fuel is now taking orders for its backyard ethanol system, but with prices at the pump topping four dollars a gallon, this invention may fuel a new trend.

There's another benefit. Cars running on sugar based ethanol produce 85 percent fewer carbon emissions than gas.