normal hooch is dangerous, too.
Anyway, my point is that the people most at risk of poisoning themselves are those unfamiliar with the process. I'm pretty sure a ton of people were doing this anyway for non-commercial purposes without realizing an unenforced federal law even existed.
Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free
The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor. The fire codes for a distillery are very strict.
This would suggest that using induction heating would be significantly safer and have the possibility of precise temperature control. Is there any reason why home distilling does/does not do this?
(Technically there actually isn’t temperature control in distilling, the temperature is just the boiling point of the mixture, which changes over time as the mixture changes from distillation, but you do control the heat input which effects the speed at which you distill. Tangential, but counterintuitive.)
The reason most don’t is just cost/practicality. You really need to have a fair bit of liquid to get good results. Like tenish gallons (~40L). You probably can’t fit a still that big on your stovetop (and you really want to do this outside anyway) and you’d need a 240v connection to provide enough heat. Your standard American wall outlet doesn’t provide enough juice.
But the standard 240v 50a you charge an EV with or, in my case, plug in your RV does. People run drier cords out a window too.
Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them. The ratio of ethanol to methanol in a distilled spirit will be approximately the same as in the wash it was distilled from. Drinking brandy you’ll get about the same ratio as if you drank the wine it was made from.
You need the same amount of ethanol to get drunk regardless of how you drink it, all distilling does is get rid of that pesky water that’s in beer and wine. (That makes some other fun things like barrel aging possible.) So you’ll also get the same amount of methanol.
Also fun fact: if you got methanol poisoning and went to the hospital the treatment is ethanol, because it blocks the metabolism of methanol. Methanol metabolizes into formic acid which damages the optic nerve.
And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.
You’d have to try hard to seriously injure yourself drinking home distilled spirits. (I’ve been doing it for 15 years.) Unless you count just drinking too much, but you’d have that problem with the professional stuff too.
This is wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.
Oversimplified might be a better description but there needs to be a rule even dumb people can use
So the rule is: discard whatever comes first
If you expect every home distiller to understand the nuances of this you're going to end up with a lot of "accidents"
North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.
I find it interesting that you have this notion. I was born in 1984. The history books in school were still implying that home distillation was dangerous. "Rot gut whiskey" "bath tub gin" are phrases that continue to come to mind when I think of the prohibition days.
No one I have ever met in all of the different levels of society here have had any strong disdain or distrust of home brewing or distillation. By the time of my upbringing, at least, the general population in the US was content with the alcohol laws. They are not aware of how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are. They are not aware of the post prohibition three tier system. They are consumers of alcohol not producers. That is what prohibition in the US did. "House wine" in the US is the wine a restaurant picks for cheap profits. "House wine" in the old days or in europe is wine you make at home. We, in general, lost that piece of culture with prohibition. It never disappeared in some parts of the country though. Appalachia moonshiners kept the tradition going in mind and spirit for the whole country.
If your statement was about other drugs, you would be spot on. Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata. Prohibition of other drugs is a different story for cultural reasons.
Do be careful. Depending on the state mushrooms become illegal at different stages of production.
Possessing schedule I controlled substances is illegal. If you grow the substance, you also possess it. Therefore it’s not legal.
Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.
Methanol is really only present in significant amounts in fruit mashes because it comes from fermentation of pectin. Grain or sugar-derived alcohol barely has any at all.
The foreshots you throw out do have things that taste bad and which you would not want to drink much of, but even if you mixed it all back in and got drunk, it would be the same amount of all of those chemicals you’d get if you just drank the mash, which is itself basically just beer or wine.
We distillers are a lot more likely to burn our house down than any other form of injury.
Please do find those papers! They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with.
To be clear - methanol boils at 64C and ethanol boils at 78C. Are you suggesting that in standard distillation, there is still some non-trace methanol coming over at 78C? If I personally observed that in a laboratory setting, I'd quickly assume measurement error or external contamination.
do you mean distills? decanting is just pouring carefully
TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.
Here are the official docs for the case
McNutt v. US Department of Justice
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca5.220...
How so? For medical reasons? For the facilitation of the Saudi Aramco oil production which funds the life and habitation of humans in Dhahran?
I suspect something was lost in translation.
briandw•1h ago