US ban on at-home distilling is unconstitutional, Texas judge rules
reuters.com
reuters.com
This just feels like government overreach. Banning something just to protect tax revenue? Even if it were constitutional, it's still completely unjustified.
Blindness is certainly one possible risk of moonshine consumption, but if you thought it was a danger of home distilling, you had the causal mechanisms badly messed up.
Blindness and kidney failure may result from methanol poisoning: as the name suggests, you get this by ingesting methanol, an alcohol which looks and smells similar to the alcohol (ethanol) in alcoholic drinks.
Does moonshine contain methanol? Only in trace amounts. Even if you made deliberate efforts to maximize methanol content, alcohol distilled from fermented cereal grains or fruits would still only contain about 5g of methanol for every 1000g of ethanol. Even if you wanted to, you won't obtain methanol by fermenting/distilling.
Why is moonshine associated with methanol poisoning, then?
Well, remember how methanol has a similar taste and smell to ethanol? It is also a cheap to produce, low tax byproduct of many industrial processes. So people wanted to a increase their profits on the moonshine they sold deliberately adulterated it by mixing in some methanol, sometimes in what they thought were non-dangerous amounts, sometimes because they didn't care and thought they'd get away with it [2]. This is called lacing moonshine; it's always a deliberate act and not something that can happen by accident or by making a mistake during home distillation.
This is not a danger of home distilling, though. It's a danger of buying adulterated products from dodgy people. And people dodgy enough to distill alcohol at home to commit tax fraud (or previously to skirt prohibition laws) are often not above poisoning people for profit either.
This has nothing to do with home distilling, though. If you buy cheap alcohol from dodgy people in countries where home distilling is banned, they still might have just bought 10 liters of vodka from the government regulated distillery then mixed it with 2 liters of methanol and sold you the higher volume mixture for profit.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshine_by_country
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_i...
It's there, get rid of it, it's easy to do and easy to screw up by missing that step.
You cannot "screw up" and poison yourself by "missing a step" during distillation. You are correct in that you can screw up and get a subpar, less enjoyable product by e.g. not discarding the foreshot, but that's very different from the dangers GP asked about above.
There are no recorded incidents of accidental methanol poisoning resulting from improperly distilled fruit or grain mash ever. If people get methanol poisoning from moonshine, it is because of laced moonshine, not an accident or mistake.
It took just a moment to check:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23520...
> Herein we present three patients belonging to the same family, who admitted to our emergency department (ED) after consuming the alcoholic drink they made at home, but died despite the optimal treatment.
Even if that was what happened (it wasn't, see the last point), we would not be able to find that out from a medical case report, because:
- The medical personnel are not cops and have no means to investigate any of this. They have no access to the equipment used to distill the alcohol, and even if they had, no reason to mess around with it instead of doing their jobs curing people. But even if they had the inclination, they have no particular scientific expertise in distillation, and no forensic lab to determine what happened.
- Even if the "home-made vodka" description is accurate, it doesn't imply that they made the drink themselves. They could have purchased it from somebody who made it at home and laced it. For a representative case, see Sterno: people were cutting their moonshine with it since it was cheap and contained only 3% methanol. This was short-term safe when mixed and consumed along with ethanol (due to metabolic reasons). In the early 70s the company behind Sterno changed the formulation to 54% methanol, and 36 people died.
- Even if the people involved made the drink themselves for their own consumption, they may have introduced methanol into their drink in ways they are not willing to admit to (e.g. methanol stolen fron a workplace or from a tank trailer, mistaken for ethanol because they look and smell identical). They are especially unlikely to admit to this if they deteriorate rapidly and expire shortly after arrival.
- They may have consumed unrelated methanol instead of their home made vodka due to a simple mistake (e.g. if they stored different alcohols in similar plastic bottles and grabbed the wrong bottle).
- To the best of our knowledge, there is no plausible chemistry which would allow this to happen, no plausible sequence of actions which could be taken accidentally during distillation of grain mash and would produce enough methanol to off 3 people like this. No, foreshot does not work, see upthread. This is understood quite well (again, home distillation is legal in many first world countries), and why methanol poisoning triggers a criminal investigation almost everywhere. Given this, a claim to the contrary from a medical case study would not be sufficient. You'd need, at the very least, an article from a forensic chemist explaining how it was determined that accidental methanol poisoning resulted from improper distillation of fruit or grain mash, and what preciously unseen freak constellation of events resulted in this outcome, when the chemistry says there's no way to achieve this outcome accidentally. But again, the article you linked does not claim that these 3 deaths were caused by an accidental mistake during distillation, so the whole point is moot.
It's explicit and spelled out in the first quote I posted. They made it themselves.
If the person you’re responsing to is correct, either they stumbled across an unknown method of grain distillation that generated unheard of amounts of methanol, or they’re lying. Which scenario is more likely?
Wine can have up to 329 mg/L of methanol [1]. Blindness can come from ingesting as low as 4ml [2].
I find it plausible that someone could try to make a 2000ml bottle of cognac. I imagine that should take ~10L of wine. The methanol should (mostly) be distilled first. If that person drank the first fruits of their labor, would they not ingest approximately the dose for permanent blindness?
[1] https://www.methanol.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/SafeHand...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/nursing-and-health-prof....
When I last made fresh squeezed orange juice, I took a sip of the first few ounces. That habit, which is common in cooking, could prove disastrous when distilling.
The distillate flows continuously so in this scenario you would either be letting your alcohol spill onto the ground while you gulp down methanol, or you would have a separate receptacle just for it that you then choose to drink from.
The liquid in the mash is a mixture of 4 or more different liquids, in wildly different proportions. Most of the mixture is not even methanol, but water. This mixture has a single boiling point, which is determined by the chemistry of the constituents. (For example, the boiling point of a mixture that contains a little bit of water and a lot of ethanol is _lower_ than the boiling point of pure ethanol. You see why trying to make predictions based purely on the boiling point of methanol won't work, do you? You can estimate vapor composition using variants of Raoult's law [1] but only after accounting carefully for azeotropy.)
Simple distillation does a poor job of separating even water from alcohol: at the end of your first distillation you'll consider yourself lucky if you got an alcohol percentage over 35%. It will also have some ethyl acetate and (if you used drupe mash) ethyl carbamate. The latter has a boiling point of 185C, so could not end up there at all under a naive/folk model of distillation.
The foreshot has plenty of its own components, including ketones like acetone (which has a lower boiling point than methanol), water of course, alcohols, occasionally copper from the equipment, but it will certainly not be pure methanol, and while methanol concentration will be somewhat higher, the vast majority of the methanol won't come from the first ounces. It will also be warm, and taste awful: taking a sip will teach you a lesson, but not give you methanol poisoning.
Chemistry is complicated, but based on our current understanding getting accidental methanol poisoning from unadulterated home distilled alcohol would be nothing short of a chemical miracle. You might be able to pull it off deliberately if you try hard, but you'll need good skills and good equipment so that you can isolate it (it's significantly less potent if taken with ethanol, due to metabplic effects). That's not to say you won't get alcohol poisoning, of course: ethanol is an alcohol, and it is poisonous.
[1] https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoret...
Methanol is 0.791 g/mL, so 4mL of methanol weighs 3.164 grams, or 3164mg. Wine only has 329mg per liter, about 10% of the 4mL you stated could cause blindness.
>> I find it plausible that someone could try to make a 2000ml bottle of cognac. I imagine that should take ~10L of wine.
If one liter has 10% of the amount required for blindness and one needs ~10 liters to make a bottle of cognac, that ten liters would have 100% the amount required to cause blindness.
Toxic products (that aren't ethanol) are trivially easy to avoid during routine distilling.
Basically, the most nasty, toxic stuff is also the stuff with the lowest boiling point; it comes out first. So collect the first 20-50 milliliters of output, toss it out, and you've removed the vast, vast majority of it. Repeat that again during 2nd and/or 3rd distillations and it's not a risk at all.
And remember: all of that stuff that makes you go blind is already in your beer / wine / etc., it's just more concentrated after distilling. Methanol production from higher rates of pectin in grapes is why red wine hangovers are the worst, for example. The receptors that are damaged and make you go blind also react to ethanol, so the reason methanol-heavy wines don't make you go blind is that the ethanol gets there first and in higher volume.
Really, the bigger risk IMO is fire and explosions. Ethanol is not just flammable, it's combustible and can absolutely burn your house down if you're not condensing and ventilating your still. Trivially easy to avoid, however, with working tap water and a $15 box fan, or even a garage with a good breeze.
Where I am in Europe, I can do my own plumbing, electricity and gas work. No permits, no need to be licensed. This doesn't affect insurance or cause any issues when I sell the house.
(In Australia, backyard stills are a smallish "thing" with many migrant communities 40% of the population is or descends from overseas. They know how to avoid the risks of the first flows, and dissolved contamination but poisoning still happens from time to time, maybe once or twice a decade)
> Lead and methanol poisoning rates rise
Lead is just made up
Methanol doesn't happen unless you are making 1000's of liters of distilled product for gas and also are drinking it and get it mixed up. Industrial processes for non food grade products can have problems if you drink it.
Homebrew spirts have less methanol than Laphroaig or Caliber because they have to keep the methanol since that also has the flavor.
> In Australia, backyard stills are a smallish "thing" with many migrant communities
And every 'Ozie Ozie Ozie Oi Oi Oi' student group. Stills are in all the homebrew stores (For "essential oils" / no one cares) e.g. air stills from their half brothers where it's legal - https://www.homebrewshop.co.nz/product/still-spirits-air-sti...
Lead: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00016616.htm#:~:te....
Methanol is a product of the first flows if you have bacterial contamination or high pectin levels in the wash. As long as you don't drink it, you're fine but pretending home stills don't have a Methanol risk because of volume is a bit odd.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5028366/
Backyard still deaths: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/diy-drink-at-yo...
Did God put corn on the earth?