Tara and I spent all day Saturday working on what was supposed to be a fun learning experience making emergency backup stoves. To our surprise what we wound up with works better than our WhisperLite! It is smaller, lighter, quieter, more efficient, better at simmering and practically free.

For our first tests we were burning Red Heet (Isoproponal), it was very sooty:

We settled on the much cleaner burning Yellow Heet (Methanol):

The guy who came up with the design calls it the Penny Alcohol Stove. The design is based around a heineken beer can as it's odd shape makes the tight fitting seals possible without any extra hardware.

You can see instructions here.

We're now undecided on bringing the WhisperLite but we're definitely going to toss two of these in our cookset either way, what a cool concept!