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Comment by reisse | Hacker News Reader

Well, I live in a country with both huge distillation culture and significantly non-zero number of methanol poisonings, and they never happen from home brewing. It's really hard to homebrew/distill methanol in a quantity enough to poison you in an otherwise ethanol solution (which acts as an antidote).

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.

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Homebrewing isn't the issue per se. Methanol from fruit and stuff people normally ferment is pretty negligible. The problem happens when the spirit is sold and broken down/stretched to go futher by middlemen by adding cheaper MeOH.

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.

Isn't that an issue with alteration and distribution rather than risk during production for self consumption and could happen for just about any product?

Yes exactly.

No one adds MeOH to homebrew. Bootlegging fake hard drinks is a completely different industry, which has zero relation to homebrewing.

I didn't say they did. If you think this ruling (if upheld) won't change things then you're kidding yourself

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.

this is wrong and dangerious! Home brewing very well can cause methanol poinonings. It doesn't happen often because the process is complex enough to get settup that anyone likey talk to someone (or read a book) and get the simple process to avoid it (throw out the beginnigs of each batch since the harmful stuff comes first).

That's incorrect. The methanol bonds tighter to water and doesn't distill out clean in the heads.

Some does. You don't need perfection of distilation to make a difference.

More is in the tails, neither is enough to be of concern.

In small batches. In very large batches there is enough to be a concern. Where the line is, is something I don't know but you better figure out if you are going to make concentrated alcohol.

Batch size has nothing to do with it.

That's not how that works. You're repeating a myth that was started by the intentional addition of methanol during prohibition.

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.

It is not a myth. It might be overblown (in the typical home batch sizes there probably isn't enough methanol to worry about anyway.) However methanol will start to boil out first and so the head will have measurable more methanol than latter - this is the basic physics of distillation. You won't get all the methanol out by discarding the head (again this is how distillation works), but you will get an elevated portion.

The myth is that a home distiller can unknowingly produce something that is poisonous due to methanol.

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...

I concluded from that, distillation cannot be used to concentrate alcohol. I'm on chemist, but I know enough to know that your article fails the sniff test - it is taking some facts but it is misapplying them.

If that's the conclusion you drew from that article, you either didn't read large sections of it or failed to understand it. Not sure how to help you but to suggest you try again.

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.

Sure you don't get zero water at 180 degrees - but you get less water which is why we can distill alcohol at all to remove water. Likewise you get more methanol in the early stages - that doesn't mean you get it all in the early stages, but you will get an elevated amount.

Exactly, now you've got it! The last caveat is that while methanol is slightly elevated in the heads, it's not meaningfully so. It's present throughout the run at nearly the same concentration. There just isn't enough methanol in a home brew to produce a meaningful early spike. And you certainly do not discard all or even a majority of the methanol if you toss the heads.

And this is why home brewing and distillation cannot cause methanol poisoning.

One leads to the other. Once you have distillation everywhere, bootlegging follows.

This was literally the basis of one of the first conflicts of the early federal government.

I'm not talking about homebrew bootlegging here. It's large-scale frauds where industrial ethanol (which often contains poisonous amounts of methanol, or _is_ methanol) is mixed with flavorants and colorants to cheaply imitate various hard drinks.

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