However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.
As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.
But isn't the point of non-socialized healthcare, like in the US, that you pay for care out of pocket? Or maybe via your insurance, which will probably increase your premium if you repeatedly engage in stupid actions that need expensive fixing?
US insurers can only discriminate by age and smoking status.
There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.
Vaccines are a good example of this, herd immunity is needed for many of them to work. Antibiotic stewardship is another, unregulated usage of antibiotics risks breeding superbugs.
More generally, "private" ideas are rarely private. Kids born to idiots practicing alternative medicine often die. This scales to societal effects if you have enough idiots. Even though capitalism makes this very fuzzy, many resources in medicine are in fact finite, meaning that time and money spent on one person might mean that another dies. Sometimes that other person is in another, usually poorer country. COVID vaccine availability illustrated that effect nicely.
Essentially what you are advocating is widespread natural selection, with potential consequences affecting anywhere from small local communities to the entire planet in rare cases (COVID is a good one, look up Trichophyton Indotineae for a recent example). And even if you actually do want that, unless you truly follow through, this also comes a huge amount of waste of very limited resources. That is unless you are willing to go the distance and advocate that unvaccinated kids with pneumonia from a measles infection should just go ahead and die because of their parents or neighbors stupid choices.
If you take Kants approach to ethics, that you should only act on principles that you would want to become a universal law, then the principle of healthcare being a private matter is a bit of a non-starter, at least by most ethical systems.
Against my will!
> There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.
That's why I pay for stuff, and other people pay me. That's how money is supposed to work. It coordinates communities.
But I guess that might be the debate line of which you spoke.
Obviously there are downsides too, but booze is popular for very good reasons.
There are many studies a quick google away that show a much more nuanced take ie [0] and [1]. But the strongest evidence is our most successful societies and civilizations have been intentionally drinking alcohol for ~10000 years [2]. If it was only detrimental then I'm pretty sure it would have worked its way out by now. I acknowledge there are negative issues.
[0]: https://www.webmd.com/diet/ss/slideshow-skinny-cocktails [1]: https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-drinks/drin... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_alcoholic_beverages
https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...
I don't have stats on hand, but I seem to remember that smoking costs much more than alcohol, despite a sizeable (1/3? not sure) proportion of car accidents being caused by the latter. Alcohol and drug use is already considered an aggravating circumstance in some situations (car crashes, assault, etc).
But yeah, I think there are activities that are clearly extremely risky and some that are clearly not. I guess alcohol lies somewhere in the middle: I never felt compelled to drive after drinking; I usually just zone out on my couch or go to bed.
There's also the fact that alcohol seems pretty much unstoppable. See how well prohibition worked in the US. Ditto for drugs and smoking, where, despite our local flavor of "war on drugs", cannabis consumption has exploded in recent years. Taxes on tobacco are extremely high here, yet many people still smoke. I understand smoking is relatively less popular than before, but people do still smoke. Alcohol consumption has also gone down, but people do still drink. Despite the communication campaigns that they're not healthy.
So I think that since there are some activities in which people tend to engage in anyway, even if they're outlawed (cannabis comes to mind), we, as a society, should figure out ways to mitigate that. Have people be accountable. Wanna do stupid shit? Knock yourself out, but don't have society bear the burden.
I don't know, as someone who mostly rides motorbikes, I wouldn't be shocked if I had to pay a premium at the hospital if I left half my face on the pavement in a crash because I figured wearing a helmet, or even serious equipment, was somehow not cool, or whatever people tell themselves to justify riding next to naked. Yes, I wear all my gear even under 40ºC. Even in the US desert, where I understand helmet wear is not mandatory. Yes, I sweat. I've only ever had a minor crash despite riding a big-ass "dangerous" crotch rocket, but I enjoy having my skin attached to my body more than not sweating. Should I pay a (lower?) premium anyway, since motorbikes are statistically more dangerous than walking? Maybe?
It's entertaining for some people.
While it is true that any amount of alcohol is technically bad for you, 'the dose makes the poison'. Drinking in moderation is relatively harmless. For example, 2 drinks / day raises one's risk of colon cancer by 6%, but that's a relative increase on top of one's ~ 4.4% lifetime risk (which also includes drinkers, so we could be double counting). So you're increasing lifetime risk to 4.7%. Do it for all cancers and you're likely increasing your total risk of death by ~ 1%. Things really only go exponential beyond ~ 20d/wk
So you have to ask yourself, is your enjoyment of the occasional beer worth the very low increased risk? For myself, the answer is yes, but I would not dream of making that decision for someone else, and I object to the government doing it for me.
Insurance should insure your risk, and that's fairly independent of what other people are doing. (Of course, other people driving dangerously can endanger your health, and thus drive up your health insurance costs.)
What you have in mind is probably a consequence of forbidding insurance companies from charging people according to risk, and forcing them to charge people some average of a pool they are placed in?
We can all debate and discuss the best way to get there, but mathematically it's a pool that includes most everyone.
If many people started doing stupid things though then yes it would raise premiums for all.
Its a chicken and egg problem as well, the way we regulate and manage health care and health insurance (at least in the US) allows for costs to pretty easily bleed out to the rest of society. That implies that we must then be collectivist in other policies, though that is counter to many of the original goals of our country and the question is whether we changed those goals or inadvertantly built a system that requires changing gials after the fact.
We have a similar problem with immigration laws. Our immigration laws today are completely counter to what they once were, and counter to what is still written on the Statue of Liberty. We have immigration laws now that are necessary because of the welfare programs we implemented, even if we wanted to live up to the older ideals we couldn't without abandoning those welfare programs entirely.
It happens all the time, especially with art, language and especially public monuments.
The Statue of Liberty’s connection to Ellis island is undeniable. The national museum of immigration is part of the same monument and run by the same staff.
It’s not ret-conning to say that the Statue of Liberty is indelibly linked - physically and symbolically - to mass migration of working and lower class people. It was the busiest port of entry for more than 60 years, and more than 20 million people entered there. There are uncountable contemporaneous accounts of immigrants viewing their passing the statue as a marker of the end of the voyage, and the beginning of their life in America.
One French guy funded it for one reason. 20 million others saw it as a symbol for something different in their lives.
At least some minimal notion of hospitality with respect to migration is part of that Enlightenment. (Kant’s Perpetual Peace is emphatic about this; Derrida annotates the relevant section with fresh eyes in Hospitality vol. 1, the first lecture and ff.)
That said, I also agree with you that symbols are not fully formed at birth and it is not the case that what they represent never changes at all in the course of their history.
This is a bit oxymoronic. People are a bit too happy to pick and choose what they like and otherwise pretend they're an island to themselves, but it doesn't take a communist to see the contradiction.
Plenty of people would agree they're willing to pay taxes and give governments the authority to build and maintain public roads, for example. That doesn't mean they would also then be okay with government taking over industry.
Like many of these sorts of choices, its false to think of it as binary because its about choosing a place on the continuum between them.
On the methanal risk issue, one possible compromise would to have places which can run free checks on booze for methanal. Not too different from the practice in France where you can bring in mushrooms you've collected to the pharmacist who can tell you which ones are delicious and which are death incarnate. But of course this would have to be a publicly funded service which america seems to loathe ("I'd rather go blind than have a single tax dollar go to free booze testing!")
This hasn't been my experience in the US over the last couple decades. Both parties like to complain about the other side, but they both spend money we don't have and are happy to fund new government programs as long as its their party's program.
Yes. It's not even a continuum: it has more than one dimension.
Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporations take defensive actions against that, and you wind up with "do not take Flumitrol if you are allergic to Flumitrol" kinds of warnings everywhere. It is "individualistic" in the most narrowly narcissistic sense, which I don't think is what the founders envisioned either.
They may have had an effect of causing a political discussion, but fiscally, immigration policy has little impact on welfare programs.
How about just don't pay for it? Why is everyone in such a hurry to take people's freedom based on a spreadsheet no less.
The most important justification for seat belt laws is ensuring that drivers can maintain control when things get spicy and keep a minor event from escalating into a collision that will harm bystanders. And other innocent people in the same car who will be injured by the unbelted person being thrown around.
Fyi, the reference to Asia is not about people killing themselves, it's about passing off inadvertantly lethal moonshine as mass-produced drinkable alcohol resulting in the deaths of other people, not yourself.
Distilling on the other hand can easily harm, or even kill, friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances.
Brewing is very unlikely to do anyone any harm other than by overconsumption of alcohol.
It's very lucrative to tax brewing and even more distilling.
All that is to say, the government is not harvesting tax from homebrew.
And that's part of why it's so heavily restricted.
That said, don't break the law, folks. It's not worth going to prison for tax evasion over a jug of shine. You can get just as tipsy off a couple glasses of fermented supermarket apple juice, and it's legal and cheaper to boot.
In practice the distillate actually has less undesirable crap in it than the source wine, since one typically only keeps a part of the run from the still ("hearts") and disposes of the rest.
W/e, I'm not your dad.
Little doubt you're correct on both counts: risk of methanol ingestion isn't high and likely government worries about a likely shortfall in its coffers. But as I inferred in my comment that risk is minimal in countries with good food/health regulations. HN is read everywhere so that's not always going to be case.
You're absolutely correct about the distillation process and that small amounts of methanol exist in wine, also one's body produces small amount of both MeOH and EtOH that aren't harmful except in very rare individuals who overproduce amounts.
The problem comes when MeOH is deliberately substituted for EtOH. In such circumstances the consumer can receive hundreds of times as much MeOH as the body is used to dealing with. The liver can normally eliminate the small amounts of naturally-produced formaldehyde and formic acid metabolites produced by alcohol dehydrogenase before any damage is done but not so when large amounts are ingested. In fact, the 100 ml figure I quoted for MeOH is at the extreme end of survivability, much lower amounts often kill.
As I said, I'm not against homebrew spirits but it's easy to envisage a situation that without proper controls and a good understanding of the dangers of MeOH substitution by the lay public (together with easy ways of testing for MeOH) that unscrupulous carpetbaggers will somehow find ways of adding MeOH—unfortunately the profit motive often nukes scruples.
Note that we are talking about industrial alcohol, which was not made for human consumption but could be distilled to make it palatable (before the toxic additives were added).
Depends in which country you reside. Where I am the denaturants methanol and pyridine were removed decades ago and replaced with the nontoxic bitterant denatonium.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-27/chapter-I/subchapter-A...
The only purpose is not to "jeopardize the revenue."
In that respect, regardless of the rate being levied, the result on behavior was intended to be very strict and immediate.
The intent is not to poison people, since the alcohol is not intended for consumption.
Morally and ethically such action results in a much worse outcome for society for many reasons. Unfortunately, that's not the view of many or those laws would not have been enacted. Even in our more enlightened times many still hold such punitive beliefs as witnessed by some posts here on HN. It seems to me opinion on whether or not alcoholic beverages ought to be permitted in society has been around so long and yet still remains so divided that the chasm will likely never close.
Fortunately, where I live (Australia) the toxic denaturants in ethanol (methanol (~15℅) and pyridine (~3%)) were removed quite some decades ago and replaced with a nontoxic denaturant—the bitterant denatonium.
We nevertheless still have a lingering reminder of the past: the once non-potable ethanol was called "Methylated Spirits" and its replacement still is! Nowadays, the methanol and pyridine are gone and what's always been colloquially nicknamed "Metho" is still labeled "Methylated Spirits" but now only consists of 95% ethanol and 5% water—the trace amount of denatonium denaturant isn't even mentioned on the label but it's definitely there.
An interesting observation: the old toxic methylated ethanol was emblazoned with the word "POISON" whereas our new Metho sans MeOH is only labeled "CAUTION".
BTW, above I mentioned the chasm never closing, whilst writing this my earlier post has oscillated wildly around a net 0, I now have the same number of votes that I started with before posting. Seems opinions are even more divided on this subject than I'd ever imagined (damn shame HN only tallies totals and not both up and down votes).
It's so rare this thread is literally the first time I've heard about possibility of methanol poisoning from homebrewing.
Methanol poisonings happen from bootlegging, where someone in the chain of supply sells industrial methanol as an ethanol, because the first one is cheaper, easier to obtain and untaxed.
There's no way to produce a dangerous amount of methanol at homebrew scales unless you are trying to do so.
Methanol does not all come out in the heads. It is present across the whole distillation run. There's just not enough of it to be dangerous.
Your statement about methanol being in the heads is also wrong, because the evaporative properties change when you have ethanol, methanol, and water all mixed together. It's not as simple as the naive "lower boiling point means it comes out first".
Here's more info if you're interested https://fx5.com/dispelling-misconceptions-about-methanol-hea...
The principle is the same reason why when you distill at 180 degrees, you do not wind up with a distillate with zero water in it.
And this is why home brewing and distillation cannot cause methanol poisoning.
This was literally the basis of one of the first conflicts of the early federal government.
Unfortunately, that has happened enough times with people dying for it to be a problem. Seems some societies are more susceptible to these extremely dangerous ripoffs than others.
In Poland and other European countries where home distillation has been practiced for centuries nothing would happen but an instant cultural shift in the US with a major uptake in homebrewing certainly will. Ratbags and carpetbaggers will find ways to get in on the act and that's when the trouble will start.
The methanol doesn't "come out in the heads" and batch size doesn't affect the final concentration as a % because roughly the same ratio is present during a run with a slight in crease in the tails due to the with methanol bonds with water.
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0b9...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402...
Methanol poisoning comes from tainted consumables.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2e9c/544909602112c2816a956b...
Nothing about more methanol in the heads either.
Your claims stand as unsupported.
If you find yourself drinking something untrustworthy you can at least cure yourself with a chaser of an equivalent amount of everclear.
If you ever find out you have been drinking methanol by all means do drink safe spirits if you have immediate access to them (after throwing up what you can if you're still in time), but get medical help now. Ethanol will not cure you from methanol poisoning, it will only help reduce and delay the damage somewhat while you're waiting for an ambulance or making your way to a hospital to get proper treatment.
I echoed the dangers of MeOH poisoning (in drink substitution, etc.) in my two posts and I've been downvoted several times without reason given.
Such misunderstandings are why I'm an advocate for strong regulations that ensure commonly-available MeOH is always denatured.
More info in link in my later reply to pessimizer.
Any amount of methanol you're getting from home distilling is going to be easily and safely canceled with alcohol.
https://youtube.com/shorts/opyKKx4rRUs?si=BE_yb1_V0SEkccbq
My family has been home brewing for decades. There's never been an issue.
First, if they are not using anything with pectin in it, there isn't a significant amount of methanol at all worth measuring.
Second, if they did use fruit skins in the fermentation stage, there still isn't enough methanol to compete with the ethanol, (which is the cure to methanol poisoning) with out intentionally poisoning the batch.
You shouldn't push such FUD.
Now that is completely incorrect. There is no way to prevent metabolism of methanol once it has been ingested, ethanol just competes with it for metabolisis.
Alcohol fermented from fruit byproduct is extremely common in many cultures. It is asinine to think that only grain will be used once this is legalised.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/methanol-poisoning-the-c...
If you don't get on dialysis within 24 hours of drinking more than 30mL of ethanol there is high risk of blindness, and higher doses can easily cause death.
"Methanol poisoning can be treated with fomepizole or ethanol.[19][22][23] Both drugs act to reduce the action of alcohol dehydrogenase on methanol by means of competitive inhibition. Ethanol, the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages, acts as a competitive inhibitor by more effectively binding and saturating the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme in the liver, thus blocking the binding of methanol. Methanol is excreted by the kidneys without being converted into the toxic metabolites formaldehyde and formic acid. "
So completely correct.
>Alcohol fermented from fruit byproduct is extremely common in many cultures. It is asinine to think that only grain will be used once this is legalised.
Not what I was saying at all. You could use grain, or sugar (cheapest and easiest). That said, the levels are not significantly high enough to poison you unless someone is trying to poison you. It's not happening when making alcohol to drink.
From the link you posted
>Administering patients with controlled doses of either ethanol or fomepizole is standard practice.
Again, what I said is completely correct, your own source confirmed it.
Secondly, also from the article
>Bootleg brewers also sometimes add enough methanol to informally produced spirits to cause serious health effects.
Again, as I said, someone intentionally trying to poison you.
And here's an actual study
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402...
>Both commercial and home-distilled alcohols exhibited methanol concentrations remarkably below the 0.35 % limit for brandy set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
You're simply misinformed.
>Bootleg brewers also sometimes add enough methanol to informally produced spirits to cause serious health effects.
I don't think the "to" here is meant to imply intent. It's "enough to", referring to the amount. I don't know where the notion comes from that people try to intentionally poison people with moonshine. Maybe in a Columbo episode. It happens when people cut corners or don't pay attention or get scammed.
“As methanol is highly soluble in water, it will distil over more at the end of distillations when vapours are richer in water. That means, methanol will appear in almost equal concentration in almost all fractions of pot still distillation in reference to ethanol (i.e., as g/hL pa), until the very end where it accumulates in the so-called tailings fraction. However, even today many professional distillers believe that methanol concentrates preferably in the first fractions.”
Hernández, J. A., Wörner, S., & Riedl, K. (2021). Methanol Mitigation during Manufacturing of Fruit Spirits with Special Regard to Novel Coffee Cherry Spirits. Foods, 10(5), 994.
So if someone gets methanol poisoning from shine, it's because it was added by someone intentionally.
So don't buy bootleg spirits.
Fomepizole costs thousands of dollars and is often unstocked for that reason in many countries, although I guess it will become stocked in the US now. Dialysis machines are also in short supply. One mass poisoning event would overwhelm available dialysis resources in a state.
>>Bootleg brewers also sometimes add enough methanol to informally produced spirits to cause serious health effects.
> Again, as I said, someone intentionally trying to poison you.
No, someone in the supply chain making cash. Someone swapped in some 20% methanol and hoped it would go unnoticed.
You can cherry pick a study from Texas where there are hardcore home distillers, but that won't change what happens when a heap of amateurs across the country do it.
Eg Turkey https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11097313/
Also let's not ignore the toxic copper and lead in the moonshine. It is a persistent problem.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01960...
Obviously you are going to hold tight to your beliefs. Please spread them somewhere else.
How do you imagine a mass poisoning event is going to occur? Is it something like a mass ecoli or salmonella event?
>No, someone in the supply chain making cash. Someone swapped in some 20% methanol and hoped it would go unnoticed.
How does that have anything to do with home made and unsold products?
You're raising a valid issue with any tainted consumable, not something specific to home distillation.
>Also let's not ignore the toxic copper and lead in the moonshine. It is a persistent problem.
You can, if you do what's common and build out of stainless steel. And again we're talking home consumption.
Why are you the police of what I poison myself with?
>Obviously you are going to hold tight to your beliefs. Please spread them somewhere else
I'm sticking with the data, you are angry and wrong. Your ignorance at this point is willful. GLWT.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1306022/
So I their words, it is an antitode, effective and recommended treatment.
For example, when I worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I was surprised to discover that the percentage of imported food/beverage actually tested for safety is very low. Like comically, microscopically, unbelievably low.
In the United States, I suspect concerns over reputation and civil litigation do more to keep our food safe than government testing.
I think that incidents elsewhere have often been caused by substituting expensive taxed industrial ethanol for cheap industrial methanol. Which is an insane thing to do but money is money.
Until another mass poisoning occurs we will continue trusting paperwork.
One shouldn't have to restate these well-known facts but they have to be repeated at every opportunity because in many ways methanol too closely resembles ethanol/EtOH, it tastes the same and induces drunkenness, and consumers may not become aware they have consumed it until its toxic effects manifest. By then, it's often too late.
Methanol's similarly to ethanol and that it's a very important industrial chemical made and used in huge qualities that makes it doubly dangerous. Many ways exist for methanol to enter the food chain both accidentally and through deliberate substitution for ethanol so it's especially important that strict regulations exist covering its handling and use.
Outside of lab grade reagents, methanol should always be denatured in ways that make its consumption both obvious and intolerable, that's best achieved by adding the denaturant denatonium (benzoate or saccharinate) in trace amounts that have little or no effect on methanol's final use.
Denatonium (aka, Bitrix, Bitrex and others), a quaternary ammonium compound, is a bitterant and likely the bitterest substance known and can be tasted by humans in parts per billion. Not only is it extremely bitter but unlike lemons it's a nasty bitterness that lingers and will immediately alert anyone who tastes it (I know, having deliberately tasted it).
HN is read internationally, so in places with good methanol handling regulations there's little doubt I'm sounding like an annoying schoolteacher overstating the obvious but from my experience many people do not know how dangerous methanol really is. As mentioned, one reads of travelers in foreign countries poisoned with drinks laced with methanol without giving a thought where their drinks originate (moreover the most vulnerable are those who come from places with good food regulations as they automatically assume what they're served is suitable for consumption).
My rave isn't to put the kibosh on homebrew spirits as I'm essentially in favor of this decision—government already dictates too many things we citizens cannot do. That said, there has to be strict regulations concerning distillation methods and commercial sales should definitely be unlawful with tough penalties.
Finally, whether this decision hold up under appeal or not, we need readily-available methanol detectors that are both cheap and portable and that anyone can easily use.
In real homebrew, you are not at risk of methanol poisoning. If you brew some beer (step 1 to making yourself whiskey), the alcohol makeup ends up being in a 1:1000 ratio of methanol to ethanol. Distilling does not create any more methanol, it merely concentrates it. Let's play out the worst possible scenario here, where you're targeting azeotropic ethanol, and specifically targeting methanol with your cuts. In order to end up with a 100ml of methanol, you would need to be running a batch of targeting 100L (26 gallons) of ethanol, which means starting with 2,000L (530 gallons) of beer. That is wildly outside the range of casual home distilling.
And keep in mind in order to hit that worst case scenario, the distiller needs to know enough to be making cuts, but not know to discard the first cut, which is done normally even without methanol concerns simply because it contains a bunch of really disgusting aromatics.
I did not say that. I'm sick of being misquoted (at least twice to this story).
I well know that methanol only appears in trace amounts in drinking spirits (also naturally in trace amounts in one's gut/body sans drinking—it's even in fruit juice). That is not what I was talking about. What I said was:
"Many ways exist for methanol to enter the food chain both accidentally and through deliberate substitution for ethanol…"
In that paragraph I made no mention of homebrew spirits and it's clear I was referring to methanol manufactured in industry on an industrial scale. Industrially-manufactured methanol has found its way into the food chain and has killed people.
You should read my reply to reisse where I make it clear how methanol could enter the food chain (right, I also mentioned it earlier).
It's pretty obvious to me that if a large cultural rush/sudden fad to homebrew spirits were to happen (assuming the decision is upheld) then things will in all probability go wrong unless there's a broad reeducation about the potential for methanol substitution coupled with regulations covering sales especially through third parties.
I'm specifically referring to the US here, the entrepreneurial nature of business being what it is this decision will be seen by some (and a few is too many) to run amok and start trading HB spirits in ways traditional homebrewers would never (or very rarely) do
It's also worth reading the link on methanol poisoning in my reply to pessimizer.
Another way to increase safety is to reduce the availability of illegal stills without quality control by enforcing the ban.
(Anyone who thinks otherwise presumably also thinks all hard drugs should be legalized since this presumably wouldn't lead to an increase in consumption.)
Why should the government be in the business of reducing consumption? Do you believe alcohol to be immoral, and the government's role to be enforcing morality?
I can see you're lacking some knowledge on what makes up a still, as well as it's completely legal use for distillation of water.
A still is just a bucket with a heat source and some vapor collector and condenser. It's easy to build from a couple of pickle jars and hot glue if you're determined.