I had 2 pints at one sitting, I have no memory of the evening past about 10pm and when I woke up my first thought was that I had had a stroke.
The rest of the stuff is still sitting in the shed.
One day as I went down to Cork by the sea
The sun it was hot and the day it was warm,
Says I a quiet pint wouldn't do me no harm
I went in and I called for a bottle of stout
Says the barman, I'm sorry, all the beer is sold out
Try whiskey or paddy, ten years in the wood
Says I, I'll try cider, I've heard it was good.
Oh never, Oh never, Oh never again
If I live to be a hundred or a hundred and ten
I fell to the ground and I couldn't get up
After drinking a quart of the Johnny Jump Up
From what I've read, it is very hard to generate methanol via fermentation alone[0] and home-brew usually has 2-3 ppm, versus a LD_{50} in the tens of thousands of ppm. Obviously, there might be problems well before the LD_{50}, but that's a lot of wiggle room (and methanol would be out-competed by the ethanol which is presumably also in the booze).
[0] Concentrating the wine via freezing (as in some ice wines or applejack) might be an exception to this, but I'm not sure.
Source: 15 years brewing/distilling. Just got lazy/too self-assured one day.
It does look pectin can be degraded into methanol by some microbes. I'm surprised there was enough feedstock to generate a problematic amount of methanol, but I'm glad you're ok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_inc...
Fruit pectin can be broken down into methanol, but it creates tiny amounts. You're talking like 20 to 200mg per liter.
BTW - prison hooch methanol poisonings would like to have a word with you. Even regular bread yeasts will make enough methanol.
Especially if we're talking about blacking out, as the GP post was saying. If you have enough methanol to be problem, it's because you're equipment is dirty. You'll get more methanol from a week-old jug of orange juice than you will out of making grape wine in warm conditions.
But this is typical of people. You're so quick to gleefully jump and declare someone "WRONG!" that they don't take a moment to figure out if their evidence even means anything. It's why I can't stand being on most programming or brewing forums anymore. Folks like you ruin it.
No, as I buy brand new carboys every time. PET 3-gallon bottles are had for like 5 bucks each and I just give them to someone else to sterilize and use in their water cooler when I'm done making a batch of wine.
Here's why I get methanol - A. high natural yeast concentration. B. Raw unfiltered mash - the grapes have had a gentle sterilizing soak in 300 ppm cold bleach water solution for 60 seconds. This wipes out most bacteria but leaves the natural yeasts mostly untouched (the haze on grapes resists lower concentrations of bleach.) This means I have tons of pectins as I'm not fermenting filtered juice like most people would when making wine, I ferment the entire thing to get maximum flavor profile (and you can't obtain such a natural blush otherwise.)
Fifteen years of doing it. I have my brewer's certifcation and used to work for (ugh) Coors.
On the question of methanol, it is my understanding it comes from the high pectin content. I always use a pectic enzyme to break down the pectin, mainly because that releases more sugars and makes the cider clearer, but possibly it helps stop methanol formation? I know it can be an issue if you distill cider into apple brandy (calvados) - but that's illegal in the UK anyway without a license, so has never been an issue.
Wild yeast causes it to start fermenting. Once it begins to froth, you bottle. After another week or so it's lightly carbonated and very slightly alcoholic.
The thing is, it continues to ferment in the bottles. So as time passes, it gets more and more alcoholic and less and less sweet, as the yeast consumes the sugar. So while the children were allowed to drink it for the first few weeks after bottling, after a certain point it was distinctly adults-only. So it's quite possible that the parent simply left theirs to ferment too long.
...I used to make ginger beer, which is a variation on the same thing; you cultivate a yeast/bacteria/ginger culture used for the fermentation rather than relying on wild yeast, but the process is the same. Thing about ginger beer, though, is that it's heavily flavoured with ginger, and you need the sugar to make it drinkable. So if you left it for too long it ended up both extremely alcoholic and mouth-puckeringly bitter.
(I can strongly recommend giving ginger beer a try, actually. It's dead easy to make, exceedingly nice, you can pick any alcohol level you like including almost none, and is a continuation of a thoroughly ancient tradition. Be warned, though: (a) it's packed full of sugar, (b) it's quite hard to make in small quantities, and (c) if you get the bug you may find yourself surreptitiously exchanging jam-jars full of biological slime at pubs with total strangers...)
1) I think that the wild yeast in my orchard is a bit "oomphy" 2) I put 8 grams of sugar a pint in for the brew. Which was far too much.
Next year I should have a decent harvest to go at (I've changed out my apple trees and the new ones put in five years ago are fruiting nicely now) so I'm going to have another go... at 4 grams a pint.