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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

When someone suggests a clever loophole, the response is usually “that would never work, the police and the judge will know exactly what you’re doing”. But somehow, a whole industry developed around the “do not do … detailed prohibited thing”.

I guess, because it somehow worked that one time, it became memorable as an exception, while in most cases it wouldn’t fly in court.

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The thing you must realize is that despite prohibition public attitude soured on it very quickly and many judges and politicians were themselves partaking in prohibited alcohol. And the situation cannot be compared with marijuana; it was on a whole different magnitude.

Back the the defense could ask for Jury nullification. Now the defense can't.

The fact is, making home alcohol is super easy. Yeast is omnipresent, and are happy to eat basically any sugar. Wild yeast won't get you alcohol concentrations in the 15-20% like commercial yeasts will, but can easily go up to 8-12%. Apples, grape juice, honey + raisins will all easily make you hard cider, wine, and mead, respectively. If you have a freezer, you can even use freeze distillation to increase the ABV. Banning all ingredients that could be made into alcohol is completely impractical.

Til you can get 20% out of fermentation, I always thought the limit was about 16 since that’s the top end for beer and wine.

Is it because starch yeasts can keep on keeping further than glucose ones?

It's the yeast strains. Some can survive higher alcohol concentrations than others.

For instance this[1] one can achieve up to 25% under right conditions.

[1] https://www.whitelabs.com/yeast-single?id=146&type=YEAST&sty...

No yeast can digest starches afaik. It's why you need a mashing phase to turn starches into simpler sugars when brewing beer.

I've heard that can be pretty harsh, though I'd be curious to know how it might fair with a little bit of aging, say 6-12 months. It requires a bit more handholding of the batch as well, but there are turbo yeasts that will get to ~14% in 24-48 hours.

I've also come across "triple distilled" turbo yeast that's supposed to be less harsh but not as high ABV.

Though there are cultures of yeast and bacteria where the bacteria breaks down the starches to sugars which in turn gets eaten by the yeast.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%C5%AB

That's aspergillus oryzae, which is a mold though.

https://www.whitelabs.com/yeast-single?id=146&type=YEAST&sty...

I dunno how it works but apparently you can get to 25%

The whole gun industry revolves around this. Can't have automatic weapons (unless you buy a preban for $10,000-100,000), fine we'll make a trigger that resets after every shot and your finger will be primed for the next one. Barrel is under 16"? There is this thing called an arm brace (legal for now... sigh). Barrel is under 16" and you want a suppressor? Well if you weld the suppressor on, pay the tax stamp, technically it's over 16" so you're good.

Prohibition never had widespread support. People were able to stock up prior to enactment, there were allowances for religious and medicinal use. People made their own alcohol before prohibition and did so after enactment. Enforcement was mostly the “big busts” but it petered out pretty quickly.

So not surprisingly something being illegal or not isn’t the critical factor, it’s the willingness to enforce the law (e.g. marijuana was essentially legal in SF well before the law was changed - you could smoke on the street and the cops wouldn’t do anything).

Yeah that makes sense to me. Wouldn't be surprised if the officials were themselves buying those wine bricks by the box.

So this could work in general in cases where at a high level (federal) the legislation satisfies some puritanical ideological goals, but individually, or at the local/state level, nobody really buys into it so its enforcement is so so.

There are a number of other examples...

Like the companies selling whip cream chargers by the case of 600... You know, for the people that need to make whipped cream by the gallon at home.

One of these cream whippers came into my hands recently. It came with a box of 10 chargers, where 1 was missing. I speculate the owner used their new cream whipper once and decided it was too much work to clean. After ~20 years they gave it to the non-profit's yard sale, where I found it.

One charger cartridge is good for maybe a pint of whipped cream. You'd need 4+ chargers for a gallon of whipped cream. A restaurant could easily go through 50 chargers a week.

https://www.amazon.com/iSi-Professional-Whipped-Cream-Charge...

GP was being facetious. The cartridges are a known way to get high of nitrous oxide. e.g.: https://youtu.be/q7Xse0E_SzA?t=440

For anyone else who was clueless, whip cream chargers are a source of nitrous oxide.

Nitrous oxide, is that the same thing as "mad oxygen"?

I've heard it being called many things, but not specifically "mad oxygen", but commonly "laughing gas". https://erowid.org/chemicals/nitrous/nitrous.shtml

For everyone thinking of legitimate reasons to purchase this. Keep in mind that you would mostly buy this stuff at a smoke shop. You're not going to a smoke shop for baking supplies...

> You're not going to a smoke shop for baking supplies

Why not? I've seen people go to a smoke shop to buy weird decorative vases before.

Bakeries do exist and bulk orders do make sense for them.

Why would a bakery use nitrous oxide for whipped cream instead of the old fashioned way, actual whipping?

Using nitrous to make the whipped cream is instantaneous and doesn't wear your arms out.

Most coffee shops use these as well to make whipped cream for drinks.

Wearing your arms out wouldn't be a problem in a bakery that's properly equipped, there are machines for that.

I can definitely see the use case in a coffee shop though.

Every Starbucks in the world uses them.

It’s kind of like a little speeding on the highway. In many places, a lot of people are OK with it and the risk of being ticketed is very low. Yet in other places, it is not OK.

Something being on paper is basically meaningless. It’s all the “soft” cues that we use and you pick up those cues through experience.

I find it amusing that you compare to traffic.

Traffic is one of the other things that HN "just doesn't get" because the rules are fuzzy and the fuzziness is contextual.

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