As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.
However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.
The article is devoid of any meaningful legal language. It is important to note that this ruling applies only to the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi as the fifth circuit is the court that decided this. That said, when parties bring cases to other federal circuit courts, they may cite this case. Frequently, circuit decisions can impact other district courts decisions.
The court invalidated IRC Sections 5601(a)(6) and 5178(a)(1)(B), finding they go beyond Congress’s taxation powers. The court’s reasoning was that these provisions amount to an “anti revenue provision” that prevents distilled spirits from coming into existence, since under 26 U.S.C. § 5001(b) taxation begins as soon as the spirit exists, so banning production eliminates the taxable event entirely.
I like the analysis of "necessary" and "proper" sections of this opinion. Hopefully, this ruling gets expanded to other circuits and eventually leads to the US Supreme Court ignoring stare decisis with regard to wickard v filburn and let it be thrown in the dust bin of history.
Edit: According to AI, I've got this a bit backwards. The ruling hits the taxing power, not the commerce clause. It's nonetheless interesting, since the machine gun ban may be affected.
The court says that you can't use a tax to ban something outright, which is what the post-1986 machine gun ban is: refusing to collect a tax on post-1986 machine guns, effectively banning them.
That leaves the commerce clause as the remaining defense for all taxes-as-bans or general outright bans. And that suggests future cases where Wickard will be under scrutiny.
---
I am not a lawyer, but I think this ruling is far more interesting than it appears.
It is aiming a crosshair at Wickard v. Filburn, which ruled that a farmer that produced wheat on his farm to exclusively to feed livestock on that same farm was affecting interstate commerce, and could be penalized for overproduction to support price controls. Keep in mind, that this definition of "interstate commerce" is so broad that it essentially reduces the category of "intra-state commerce" to nothing, which seems dubious.
That ruling is the basis of a huge portion of the federal government's powers under the commerce clause of the constitution.
The supreme court will likely have to rule on this eventually, and how it threads the needle will be very important.
If Wickard were simply struck down, the U.S. would be reformed into a weak federation, akin perhaps to pre-EU Europe, where laws vary wildly between states, and the federal government has little power. No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.
That's unlikely to happen, but the court would either have to reaffirm Wickard, or would have to come up with a new standard to keep, say, the $200 tax on pre-1986 machine guns effective (preventing a garage machine gun), but allow some notion of non-economic activity like home distilling to continue.
The OBBB reduced the tax on suppressors to $0, which strongly undermines the idea that home production of suppressors can be regulated by Wickard, since there is no tax interest to protect.
How it might affect the controlled substances act is more complicated, since there is no tax on illegal drugs, and the government has decided to entirely ban non-pharmaceutical street drugs, hence even "hobby" production clearly undermines that policy.
It's an area with lots of apparent but longstanding contradictions and questionable standards, but it would upend much of the New Deal to reverse it.
Another quick look at your history also tells you why a strong federal government has downsides. Life is full of compromises, but I like me some subsidiarity.
Distilling at home was fairly traditional long before high alcohol prices. Sure, high prices encourages some folks and helps ensure there is space for a black market. But technically, the high prices didn't cause distilling.
> Ethanol is the most commonly used antidote to block the metabolising of methanol. Ethanol works by competing with the metabolic breakdown of methanol, thereby preventing the accumulation of toxic byproducts.
Anything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe.
I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.
This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.
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.
> This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.
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.
I suspect that the vapor of the mash is always a mix of the components, and even above the boiling point of methanol, it still produces a mixed vapor. At room temperature, all of the components produce some vapor and will evaporate. This continues as the temperature rises.
It's not clear to me that simple distillation of a methanol/ethanol mixture can produce either pure ethanol or pure methanol at any point, just as it's impossible to distill ethanol and water to pure ethanol (absolute alcohol) if the water is above a small percentage of the mixture.
I would assume it depends on what you are distilling.
If you are making brandy from clarified wine, it probably separates better than rotten grape mash.
It is still a continuum with some methanol molecules likely remaining even in the tails.
For all intents and purposes, the distiller's rule of thumb of throwing away the angels' share is still going to work because low methanol concentrations are never an issue —for the antidote for methanol is ethanol.
I mean—depending how much methanol was in the mix to begin with…
It’s been a long time, but I thought there was a whole Raoult’s Law thing, about partial pressures in the vapor coming off the solution combining in proportion to each component’s molar fraction * its equilibrium vapor pressure (at that temperature, presumably). Or something.
Point being, if you’re starting with a bunch of volatiles in solution, there’d be quite a bit of smearing between fractions boiling off at any given temperature/pressure. And you’d be very unlikely to get clean fractions from a single distillation anywhere in that couple-dozen-degree range.
Probably mangled the description, but isn’t that why people do reflux columns?
From what I understood ethanol and methanol form an azeotrope and boil together at a mixed temperature. And the going blind stuff is just prohibition propaganda both to make home distilled alcohol seem dangerous and to scapegoat the fact that the government was actively poisoning "industrial" ethanol.
methanol and ethanol do not form an azeotrope with each other, they only (both, each) bind to water. that's why separation of methanol and ethanol by holding key temperatures works at all.
furthermore, the azeotrope effect only becomes relevant at concentrations beyond 90% alcohol. so when you're producing pure methanol and ethanol, then distillation won't cut it beyond 90+% as water+(m)ethanol then *at these high concentrations* boil and evaporate together. that's the grain of truth in your statement.
last not least going blind from methanol is _very_ real.
Look at it this way:
The boiling point of ammonia is -33 C.
Would you drink a jug of household cleaning ammonia just because it's been heated to +20C?
But anyway, I don't think there's hazardous levels left after normal distillation+cutting, the reason for not buying booze from some guy behind a barn usually has more to do with lead contamination risks.
I went to Bin Inn in Masterton NZ because it was supposedly where you could recycle a certain brand of glass jar. The guy running the place clearly had no idea what I was talking about but took them anyway because he was nuts. I was looking around the place a bit as I'd never been there before, not realising he was following me. I paused to read a bottle on the shelf and suddenly he was talking very loudly over my shoulder:
You shouldn't buy those, terribly expensive.
Oh I don't really drin...
Used to be a chap in here all the time, made his own, beautiful stuff.
Ok well like I say I'm not rea...
I can sell you everything you need, you should make your own gin, much cheaper.
Oh, so did you drink his stuff too?
Nah I'd never touch it.
What but you said it was beau...
Yeah he drank it and died.
Definitely up on the list of bizarre interactions I've had here.
This doesn’t make sense. Whether or not you have methanol depends on what you are distilling from. Distillation doesn’t create methanol and many sources of ethanol contain negligible methanol.
TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.
As distillation continues the concentration of methanol drops.
The highest concentration is at the start. This is also generally full of undesirable flavours.
People also forget that ethanol competitively inhibits metabolism of methanol in a way that protects healthy adults from toxicity.
A safe alcoholic drink can have methanol in it, iirc it's about 80:1 ethanol:methanol by EU rules. And generally considered tolerable [0].
What is actually toxic is much higher ratios of methanol than that.
Unless you have severely f'd up your fermentables you shouldn't even have that much methanol in the starter!
This is why everyone is disagreeing with the safety in this thread.
It's also why people wonder why so many tourist destinations have been mixing methanol into alcoholic drinks. They probably could serve drunk people high concentrations relying on ethanol already in their blood and follow up drinks to stop noticeable harm.
Probably most adults could drink 5-10% methanol (if ethanol is about 50%) and never notice the toxicity.
Good question, I think it's to get people drunk and buying more drinks.
As opposed to the crowd sobering up and leaving.
But also I believe the bar (staff) often genuinely don't know what their serving is harmful.
I should have added the limit to safety at low levels of methanol is actually that your body processes ethanol much faster than methanol. So it's more that the crowd goes home and then hours later (once ethanol has been cleared) the methanol finally is picked up by the enzymes that makes it toxic. If they stay drunk (on ethanol) for days the methanol might have been excreted before being toxified.
I've never tasted it but from what I remember from high school chemistry class, it certainly smelled close enough to other alcohols, so I assume it would taste close enough as well.
TBH, I also had to do my own bit of googling because I barely drink alcohol to begin with, but it does look like "at the start", it's not very distinguishable from ethanol in taste and in effect.
If ethanol and methanol were readily distinguishable by taste, much fewer people would have died or gone blind drinking moonshine.
Whatever subtle differences exist between them are probably unnoticeable to people who are already drunk, not to mention drinking cocktails with all sorts of other flavors mixed in.
It seems to parse just fine? They create some unknown mixture of methanol/ethanol (who knows what the ratio is, who cares, like you said, depends what you're making it from) and then raise it past the boiling point of methanol, throwing away everything that comes over while still under the boiling point of ethanol. It sounds like basic distillation to me.
I visited Norway and was blown away by the price of alcohol. Given that the sun only comes out for a fraction of an hour in winter I struggled to believe it. At a local bar... (I think I was in trondheim?) I asked how they afforded booze? (it worked out to 15$ USD per pint), "We don't, but we do it anyways"
Yes. Wine with between 10-15% alcohol by volume[1] currently has a tax of 5,41 NOK per percent ABV per liter. So a typical 0.75 liter bottle of 12% ABV wine gets a tax of 12*0.75 = 53.19 NOK, or about $5.6 / €4.8.
For booze above 22% ABV the tax is currently 9.23 NOK. So a 0.7 liter bottle of 40% ABV Whiskey or similar would get 258 NOK or $27 / €23 in tax.
And on top of that comes the usual 25% VAT, and high wages to our bartenders etc.
Prices tend to correlate strongly with wages and wages are very high in Norway for all work, so they also have some of the highest prices on basically everything. Another lol example is a Big Mac combo meal in Oslo - you're looking at around $20.
Scandinavian countries have very specific alcohol policies, though, very restrictionist, and the tax is part of this.
This is not just question of "more expensive country, more expensive stuff". Switzerland or Luxembourg are quite expensive, but you will buy affordable and good Italian/Spanish/French wine there, because these countries don't impose anywhere near as much taxation on wine.
Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. Outside the compound, the locally-distilled "sid" is on offer. Both varieties have been available for a half-century with no reports of poisoning.
That’s actually a common myth perpetuated by the American government during prohibition. The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch to blind people, then they told people they’d go blind from moonshine to discourage it.
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.
>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.
This is wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.
Having seperate boiling points wont matter if they form into an azeotrope. Not all liquids can be distilled from one another even though every liquid has a different boiling point.
"Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them."
This doesn't sound quite right. Distillation concentrates alcohols as a function of their boiling points and the temperature. Heavier alcohols have higher boiling points so methanol will be distilled faster than ethanol. This means that it is can become more concentrated in the distillate. The idea that the relative proportion of compounds can change is the whole idea of distillation in the first place. To be fair, people have been distilling alcohols just fine for a few hundred years now so clearly this can be done safely with primitive technology. But is definitely possible to increase the methanol concentration relative to ethanol through distillation and it should definitely come off the still first if you just apply heat.
Huh, I thought if you held the outlet of the still at 79c until you stopped getting distillate then you could be reasonably sure that you took out most of the the majority of the methanol.
Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.
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.
>North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation.
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.
In the modern world they don’t have to be. I’m not sure a bubbling still in every home is a great idea but they won’t be wood fired so that’s a start. You could also test alcohol cheaply these days for the poisonous alcohols.
Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free
That’s because they adulterate it with methanol. Methanol can be derived from natural gas cheaply. I wrote a long comment above about why this isn’t a risk with home distilling.
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.
> The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor.
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?
Electric heating does reduce the risk of fire, yes, and some of us do it. (It’s also just a lot easier than a turkey fryer.) I rigged a water heater element up for this purpose.
(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.
I find this line of thinking fascinating considering how many things we do without a second thought (forced to drive for basic errands, etc.) that are orders of magnitude more dangerous.
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.
A colleague from the region explained to me that if the booze is cheap, you just make sure you drink plenty of good booze too. Blocks the metabolic pathway.
Yes, that is true. But almost no one really does this, cutting the head is what is usually done and I have never heard of someone poisoning themselves with homemade țuică. It's fine, really. It seems USians are convinced homemade hooch will blind you without having absolutely no personal experience with it.
Depends what you make it from. If you distill eight litres of wine into about a litre brandy without removing methanol, it has the same amount of methanol than eight litres of wine did. Given the average of 150mg/l of methanol in red wine, this puts it to about 1g of methanol in that amount. That is not healthy, but you need to keep in mind ingestion of alcohol slows down the metabolism of methanol through competition and the methanol will be excreted by your kidneys instead of being metabolized.
So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.
The eastern part of Czechia (Moravia) plus Slovakia will distill anything that grows, too, and methanol poisonings are almost non-existent here. Don't underestimate centuries of tradition and know-how.
The only exception was a methanol affair 15 years ago, but that had nothing to do with home distillation. In that particular case, two bozos inspired by a badly understood Wikipedia article bought and mixed enormous amounts of industrial methanol with ethanol and sold the resulting mixture on the black market, killing dozens of people and triggering a temporary prohibition as the authorities scrambled to find all the poisoned booze.
That (CSA) falls under regulating interstate commerce instead of tax powers. Picking up a flower and smoking it on the spot is interstate commerce thus i dont think this same idea applies.
This is bad information. The precursors being legal doesn’t mean anything about the legality of producing scheduled drugs from them. The precursors for home distilling are also legal.
Possessing schedule I controlled substances is illegal. If you grow the substance, you also possess it. Therefore it’s not legal.
As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.
However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.
> Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.
Another way to increase safety is to reduce the availability of illegal stills without quality control by enforcing the ban.
The article is devoid of any meaningful legal language. It is important to note that this ruling applies only to the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi as the fifth circuit is the court that decided this. That said, when parties bring cases to other federal circuit courts, they may cite this case. Frequently, circuit decisions can impact other district courts decisions.
The court invalidated IRC Sections 5601(a)(6) and 5178(a)(1)(B), finding they go beyond Congress’s taxation powers. The court’s reasoning was that these provisions amount to an “anti revenue provision” that prevents distilled spirits from coming into existence, since under 26 U.S.C. § 5001(b) taxation begins as soon as the spirit exists, so banning production eliminates the taxable event entirely.
Here are the official docs for the case
McNutt v. US Department of Justice
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca5.220...
I like the analysis of "necessary" and "proper" sections of this opinion. Hopefully, this ruling gets expanded to other circuits and eventually leads to the US Supreme Court ignoring stare decisis with regard to wickard v filburn and let it be thrown in the dust bin of history.
Sounds similar to the 'tax' power making it impossible to buy a tax stamp for a post 86 machine gun.
The Fifth Circuit tells us how the Supremes will vote.
Edit: According to AI, I've got this a bit backwards. The ruling hits the taxing power, not the commerce clause. It's nonetheless interesting, since the machine gun ban may be affected.
The court says that you can't use a tax to ban something outright, which is what the post-1986 machine gun ban is: refusing to collect a tax on post-1986 machine guns, effectively banning them.
That leaves the commerce clause as the remaining defense for all taxes-as-bans or general outright bans. And that suggests future cases where Wickard will be under scrutiny.
---
I am not a lawyer, but I think this ruling is far more interesting than it appears.
It is aiming a crosshair at Wickard v. Filburn, which ruled that a farmer that produced wheat on his farm to exclusively to feed livestock on that same farm was affecting interstate commerce, and could be penalized for overproduction to support price controls. Keep in mind, that this definition of "interstate commerce" is so broad that it essentially reduces the category of "intra-state commerce" to nothing, which seems dubious.
That ruling is the basis of a huge portion of the federal government's powers under the commerce clause of the constitution.
The supreme court will likely have to rule on this eventually, and how it threads the needle will be very important.
If Wickard were simply struck down, the U.S. would be reformed into a weak federation, akin perhaps to pre-EU Europe, where laws vary wildly between states, and the federal government has little power. No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.
That's unlikely to happen, but the court would either have to reaffirm Wickard, or would have to come up with a new standard to keep, say, the $200 tax on pre-1986 machine guns effective (preventing a garage machine gun), but allow some notion of non-economic activity like home distilling to continue.
The OBBB reduced the tax on suppressors to $0, which strongly undermines the idea that home production of suppressors can be regulated by Wickard, since there is no tax interest to protect.
How it might affect the controlled substances act is more complicated, since there is no tax on illegal drugs, and the government has decided to entirely ban non-pharmaceutical street drugs, hence even "hobby" production clearly undermines that policy.
It's an area with lots of apparent but longstanding contradictions and questionable standards, but it would upend much of the New Deal to reverse it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
> No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.
States can still do civil rights etc.
A quick look at our history shows why this was important at a federal level.
Another quick look at your history also tells you why a strong federal government has downsides. Life is full of compromises, but I like me some subsidiarity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
Seems to have worked rather well though.
If it works so well, perhaps delegate authority even more centrally. To the UN or so?
In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.
Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
Distilling at home was fairly traditional long before high alcohol prices. Sure, high prices encourages some folks and helps ensure there is space for a black market. But technically, the high prices didn't cause distilling.
Alcohol is always poisonous (but mixed with methanol quite a bit more poisonous ) :-)
And if you have one of those poisons the antedote is the other one.
Edit: only one way round! This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I am not your doctor or drinking doula.
you suggest additional drinking methanol when you're "normally" drunk?? that's dangerously counterfactual.
No, ethanol is an antidote to methanol
vice versa
> Ethanol is the most commonly used antidote to block the metabolising of methanol. Ethanol works by competing with the metabolic breakdown of methanol, thereby preventing the accumulation of toxic byproducts.
MSF: https://methanolpoisoning.msf.org/en/for-health-professional...
I can see the ambiguity of my comment. I was trying to phrase as a riddle but can be interpreted both ways.
Anything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe.
I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.
This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.
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.
> This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.
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.
I suspect that the vapor of the mash is always a mix of the components, and even above the boiling point of methanol, it still produces a mixed vapor. At room temperature, all of the components produce some vapor and will evaporate. This continues as the temperature rises.
It's not clear to me that simple distillation of a methanol/ethanol mixture can produce either pure ethanol or pure methanol at any point, just as it's impossible to distill ethanol and water to pure ethanol (absolute alcohol) if the water is above a small percentage of the mixture.
I would assume it depends on what you are distilling.
If you are making brandy from clarified wine, it probably separates better than rotten grape mash.
It is still a continuum with some methanol molecules likely remaining even in the tails.
For all intents and purposes, the distiller's rule of thumb of throwing away the angels' share is still going to work because low methanol concentrations are never an issue —for the antidote for methanol is ethanol.
I mean—depending how much methanol was in the mix to begin with…
It’s been a long time, but I thought there was a whole Raoult’s Law thing, about partial pressures in the vapor coming off the solution combining in proportion to each component’s molar fraction * its equilibrium vapor pressure (at that temperature, presumably). Or something.
Point being, if you’re starting with a bunch of volatiles in solution, there’d be quite a bit of smearing between fractions boiling off at any given temperature/pressure. And you’d be very unlikely to get clean fractions from a single distillation anywhere in that couple-dozen-degree range.
Probably mangled the description, but isn’t that why people do reflux columns?
From what I understood ethanol and methanol form an azeotrope and boil together at a mixed temperature. And the going blind stuff is just prohibition propaganda both to make home distilled alcohol seem dangerous and to scapegoat the fact that the government was actively poisoning "industrial" ethanol.
this is dangerously wrong in several dimensions
methanol and ethanol do not form an azeotrope with each other, they only (both, each) bind to water. that's why separation of methanol and ethanol by holding key temperatures works at all.
furthermore, the azeotrope effect only becomes relevant at concentrations beyond 90% alcohol. so when you're producing pure methanol and ethanol, then distillation won't cut it beyond 90+% as water+(m)ethanol then *at these high concentrations* boil and evaporate together. that's the grain of truth in your statement.
last not least going blind from methanol is _very_ real.
> From what I understood ethanol and methanol form an azeotrope
I don't think so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope_tables
Look at it this way: The boiling point of ammonia is -33 C. Would you drink a jug of household cleaning ammonia just because it's been heated to +20C?
But anyway, I don't think there's hazardous levels left after normal distillation+cutting, the reason for not buying booze from some guy behind a barn usually has more to do with lead contamination risks.
I went to Bin Inn in Masterton NZ because it was supposedly where you could recycle a certain brand of glass jar. The guy running the place clearly had no idea what I was talking about but took them anyway because he was nuts. I was looking around the place a bit as I'd never been there before, not realising he was following me. I paused to read a bottle on the shelf and suddenly he was talking very loudly over my shoulder:
You shouldn't buy those, terribly expensive. Oh I don't really drin... Used to be a chap in here all the time, made his own, beautiful stuff. Ok well like I say I'm not rea... I can sell you everything you need, you should make your own gin, much cheaper. Oh, so did you drink his stuff too? Nah I'd never touch it. What but you said it was beau... Yeah he drank it and died.
Definitely up on the list of bizarre interactions I've had here.
This doesn’t make sense. Whether or not you have methanol depends on what you are distilling from. Distillation doesn’t create methanol and many sources of ethanol contain negligible methanol.
TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.
Everyone is talking in circles.
As distillation continues the concentration of methanol drops.
The highest concentration is at the start. This is also generally full of undesirable flavours.
People also forget that ethanol competitively inhibits metabolism of methanol in a way that protects healthy adults from toxicity.
A safe alcoholic drink can have methanol in it, iirc it's about 80:1 ethanol:methanol by EU rules. And generally considered tolerable [0].
What is actually toxic is much higher ratios of methanol than that.
Unless you have severely f'd up your fermentables you shouldn't even have that much methanol in the starter!
This is why everyone is disagreeing with the safety in this thread.
It's also why people wonder why so many tourist destinations have been mixing methanol into alcoholic drinks. They probably could serve drunk people high concentrations relying on ethanol already in their blood and follow up drinks to stop noticeable harm.
Probably most adults could drink 5-10% methanol (if ethanol is about 50%) and never notice the toxicity.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11926610/
Genuine q then. Why don't the destinations serve watered down shots instead? If it is just to save money.
Good question, I think it's to get people drunk and buying more drinks.
As opposed to the crowd sobering up and leaving.
But also I believe the bar (staff) often genuinely don't know what their serving is harmful.
I should have added the limit to safety at low levels of methanol is actually that your body processes ethanol much faster than methanol. So it's more that the crowd goes home and then hours later (once ethanol has been cleared) the methanol finally is picked up by the enzymes that makes it toxic. If they stay drunk (on ethanol) for days the methanol might have been excreted before being toxified.
Probably because a- people can tell, and b- you sell more to already drunk people, so getting them drunk sooner is better.
So maybe the answer is water down the shots of your obviously drunk customers.
Ah I didn't realise methanol had the same psychological effect. I thought it was just tasteless poison.
I've never tasted it but from what I remember from high school chemistry class, it certainly smelled close enough to other alcohols, so I assume it would taste close enough as well.
TBH, I also had to do my own bit of googling because I barely drink alcohol to begin with, but it does look like "at the start", it's not very distinguishable from ethanol in taste and in effect.
If ethanol and methanol were readily distinguishable by taste, much fewer people would have died or gone blind drinking moonshine.
Whatever subtle differences exist between them are probably unnoticeable to people who are already drunk, not to mention drinking cocktails with all sorts of other flavors mixed in.
It seems to parse just fine? They create some unknown mixture of methanol/ethanol (who knows what the ratio is, who cares, like you said, depends what you're making it from) and then raise it past the boiling point of methanol, throwing away everything that comes over while still under the boiling point of ethanol. It sounds like basic distillation to me.
>Anything that decants below 78.4C
do you mean distills? decanting is just pouring carefully
Yeah. No idea why I wrote decant.
Thank you for asking, I was so confused.
I visited Norway and was blown away by the price of alcohol. Given that the sun only comes out for a fraction of an hour in winter I struggled to believe it. At a local bar... (I think I was in trondheim?) I asked how they afforded booze? (it worked out to 15$ USD per pint), "We don't, but we do it anyways"
The real answer: Folks rarely get very drunk at the bar. Folks have drinks at home, go to the bar and drink modestly, and drink after.
And I'll let you know that my shortest days are 4.5 hours long (with weak sunlight!). Oslo has slighly longer days still.
Why is it so expensive? High vice taxes?
Yes. Wine with between 10-15% alcohol by volume[1] currently has a tax of 5,41 NOK per percent ABV per liter. So a typical 0.75 liter bottle of 12% ABV wine gets a tax of 12*0.75 = 53.19 NOK, or about $5.6 / €4.8.
For booze above 22% ABV the tax is currently 9.23 NOK. So a 0.7 liter bottle of 40% ABV Whiskey or similar would get 258 NOK or $27 / €23 in tax.
And on top of that comes the usual 25% VAT, and high wages to our bartenders etc.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume
Prices tend to correlate strongly with wages and wages are very high in Norway for all work, so they also have some of the highest prices on basically everything. Another lol example is a Big Mac combo meal in Oslo - you're looking at around $20.
A large Bic Mac meal with plain fries and soda is 123 NOK or $12.91, and a large double Quarter pounder menu is 168 NOK or $17.63.
It's actually relatively cheap right now, I expect a price hike soon given how much grocery prices have increased.
Scandinavian countries have very specific alcohol policies, though, very restrictionist, and the tax is part of this.
This is not just question of "more expensive country, more expensive stuff". Switzerland or Luxembourg are quite expensive, but you will buy affordable and good Italian/Spanish/French wine there, because these countries don't impose anywhere near as much taxation on wine.
Making their waaaaayyyy.. The only way they know how. But that's just a little bit more than the law would allow. Yee-haw!
Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. Outside the compound, the locally-distilled "sid" is on offer. Both varieties have been available for a half-century with no reports of poisoning.
>Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia.
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.
Saudi Arabia is a famously dry country in all meanings of the word, there's not much fun to be had as an expat unless you make your own.
Why do you need to distill your spirits? If you really need alcohol, can't you drink undistilled beverages to have 'fun'?
How does Texas law affect the possibility of distilling in a Saudi compound? What’s the jurisdiction there?
I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.
That’s actually a common myth perpetuated by the American government during prohibition. The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch to blind people, then they told people they’d go blind from moonshine to discourage it.
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.
>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.
This is wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.
Having seperate boiling points wont matter if they form into an azeotrope. Not all liquids can be distilled from one another even though every liquid has a different boiling point.
Ethanol and methanol don't form an azeotrope.
Yes
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"
"Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them." This doesn't sound quite right. Distillation concentrates alcohols as a function of their boiling points and the temperature. Heavier alcohols have higher boiling points so methanol will be distilled faster than ethanol. This means that it is can become more concentrated in the distillate. The idea that the relative proportion of compounds can change is the whole idea of distillation in the first place. To be fair, people have been distilling alcohols just fine for a few hundred years now so clearly this can be done safely with primitive technology. But is definitely possible to increase the methanol concentration relative to ethanol through distillation and it should definitely come off the still first if you just apply heat.
Huh, I thought if you held the outlet of the still at 79c until you stopped getting distillate then you could be reasonably sure that you took out most of the the majority of the methanol.
You can. I think parent is using some technicality of how distillation is not going to get you to 100.0000% purity.
Interesting one.
Experienced distiller here. This comment is spot on.
Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.
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.
>North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation.
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.
In the modern world they don’t have to be. I’m not sure a bubbling still in every home is a great idea but they won’t be wood fired so that’s a start. You could also test alcohol cheaply these days for the poisonous alcohols.
Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free
That’s because they adulterate it with methanol. Methanol can be derived from natural gas cheaply. I wrote a long comment above about why this isn’t a risk with home distilling.
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.
> The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor.
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?
Electric heating does reduce the risk of fire, yes, and some of us do it. (It’s also just a lot easier than a turkey fryer.) I rigged a water heater element up for this purpose.
(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.
> Like tenish gallons (~40L).
Ah, that would do it. I was thinking this was like beer homebrewing and would be around a gallon.
Thanks for the info.
I'm sure availability of testing methods and equipment has come a long way since the 1860s. As well as quality and purity of materials.
well, poisonous.
normal hooch is dangerous, too.
I find this line of thinking fascinating considering how many things we do without a second thought (forced to drive for basic errands, etc.) that are orders of magnitude more dangerous.
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.
Meh, home distilled spirits are everywhere in Romania. I drank many many times home distilled spirits. They are not that dangerous.
This reads as authenticity Eastern European.
A colleague from the region explained to me that if the booze is cheap, you just make sure you drink plenty of good booze too. Blocks the metabolic pathway.
Yes, that is true. But almost no one really does this, cutting the head is what is usually done and I have never heard of someone poisoning themselves with homemade țuică. It's fine, really. It seems USians are convinced homemade hooch will blind you without having absolutely no personal experience with it.
How's your eyesight?
Depends what you make it from. If you distill eight litres of wine into about a litre brandy without removing methanol, it has the same amount of methanol than eight litres of wine did. Given the average of 150mg/l of methanol in red wine, this puts it to about 1g of methanol in that amount. That is not healthy, but you need to keep in mind ingestion of alcohol slows down the metabolism of methanol through competition and the methanol will be excreted by your kidneys instead of being metabolized.
So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.
The eastern part of Czechia (Moravia) plus Slovakia will distill anything that grows, too, and methanol poisonings are almost non-existent here. Don't underestimate centuries of tradition and know-how.
The only exception was a methanol affair 15 years ago, but that had nothing to do with home distillation. In that particular case, two bozos inspired by a badly understood Wikipedia article bought and mixed enormous amounts of industrial methanol with ethanol and sold the resulting mixture on the black market, killing dozens of people and triggering a temporary prohibition as the authorities scrambled to find all the poisoned booze.
They are now both serving life.
Not great, but I'm not blind.
Looks like they didn't see your comment
Great. Now make it legal to grow ANY type of flower.
That (CSA) falls under regulating interstate commerce instead of tax powers. Picking up a flower and smoking it on the spot is interstate commerce thus i dont think this same idea applies.
Awesome... time to get the moonshine flowing again!
Good! Now let's do civil asset forfeiture.
FYI you can also grow psychedelic mushrooms at home in all 50 states legally. The precursors are legal
This is bad information. The precursors being legal doesn’t mean anything about the legality of producing scheduled drugs from them. The precursors for home distilling are also legal.
Possessing schedule I controlled substances is illegal. If you grow the substance, you also possess it. Therefore it’s not legal.
I've bought grain spawn cubensis bags at head shops before. Super easy to grow.
Do be careful. Depending on the state mushrooms become illegal at different stages of production.