For those wondering, the opinion[0] doesn't address the Commerce Clause power (and Wickard and Raich) becaue the government abandoned that argument. See footnote 5.
The Commerce Clause issue is raised in our other case[1] that's now pending before the Sixth Circuit.
As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.
However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.
There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence and that's totally normal, that's what freedom is.
As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.
I forget the exact wording, but the seat belt law are a good example of it. Laws are passed to protect the populace from self harm so that society doesn't suffer from it. It probably doesn't apply here because home distillation is very niche. However, if a bunch of people show up in emergency rooms and it drives up health care costs then expect a quick reversal in policy.
There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.
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.
Right, and I, as someone living in France and paying a hefty part of my income to fund public healthcare, understand that the state would want to limit people doing stupid shit costing the society a fortune in fixing them (though, of course, this just creates a debate on where to draw the line).
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?
Society still has paid at least for your education, depends on your working power to at least fund your dependents, and at least on some degree of reasonableness from you not to raise everyone's insurance premiums.
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.
Either pay for my health care or get your nose out of it. If my healthcare is going to be my own private matter, then it should be just that. How insulting.
Individual heath insurance premiums aren’t linked to your behavior or health or activities (apart from smoking). Most of that was made illegal by the insurance reforms in the “ObamaCare” bill.
If many people started doing stupid things though then yes it would raise premiums for all.
Let's be honest here: there is no benefit to alcohol (for example wine) and is only detrimental. As a true French person who does want the government paying for "stupid shit" you need to call for the end of wine making and its consumption.
But I guess that might be the debate line of which you spoke.
"Let's be honest here: there is no benefit to alcohol (for example wine) and is only detrimental." - That is a pretty extreme statement and easily falsifiable.
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.
I don't know, maybe? There already are laws around advertising alcohol, to the dismay of the local wine industry.
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?
You must be fun at parties? Some forms of alcohol are tasty and all of them loosen inhibitions, which is beneficial for both recreation and procreation.
Obviously there are downsides too, but booze is popular for very good reasons.
Seat belt laws are an interesting example though because they only apply when driving on public roads. You can drive your car with no seat belt on a private track all day if you want to.
Agree completely, though sadly we are a very long way from this. In a lot of places it is literally illegal and prison-time just for growing certain naturally-occurring plants for purely personal use. I don't see how this ruling helps with that at all though
Killing yourself is one thing. Killing or crippling potentially many people is negligence terrorism. And you can forget that these guys will keep it for themselves. Purpose of alcohol is to create bonds by sharing it with others. It can go as far as bringing your homemade moonshine on local festivities and poisoning half of the locals without them realizing what has happened until it is too late.
>There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves...A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence
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.
From ~1906 through prohibition the Feds purposely poisoned industrial alcohol with methanol and other chemicals as a deterrent. 100 years ago, in 1926, they increased it, up to as much as 10%. This was true rotgut. Around 10,000 people, mostly poor, died from it. Blindness, organ failure, paralysis. This was legal and regulated by the Volstead Act. It was the primary source of methanol poisoning during prohibition.
This is still routinely done to avoid ethanol taxes. It's called "denatured alcohol". Ethanol that has been poisoned is not considered drinkable alcohol, so not subject to the taxes on drinkable alcohol.
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).
Yep, never forget. The government literally poisoned people. Anytime I mention this I get eye rolls and immediate dismissal as a kook. It's quite frustrating.
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.
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).
The way you're saying it is deeply irresponsible. The way to deal with methanol poisoning is not "just ethanol", and you cannot "cure yourself" by drinking 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.
Worth noting that even in clinical settings, ethanol has largely been replaced by fomepizole (Antizol) as the preferred antidote. It's more predictable, easier to dose, and doesn't come with the side effect of making a critically ill patient drunk. Ethanol is the field expedient, not the standard of care.
While the treatment for methanol poisoning indeed includes ethanol, I don’t think your dosage suggestion is right. Your body would still have to process all the methanol, the job of the ethanol is just to slow down the reaction. If you suspect methanol poisoning you need the hospital, they will administer the ethanol intravenously and I think do dialysis to remove the methanol and the formic acid it metabolizes to (this is one of the toxins in ant venom)
The common knowledge about methanol being a huge risk is wildly overstated in reality, and likely continues in part because it benefits the government for people to believe strongly in the danger and continue to purchase taxed liquor. Distillation does not create new chemicals: there is methanol in your bottle of wine, and distilling that wine into brandy does not change the ratio, it only removes (primarily) water. Common distilling practice is to dispose of the highest concentrations of the most volatile components (acetaldehyde, higher alcohols). Low levels of methanol remain present in a gradient throughout the distilled product. Methanol production in fermentation is not a significant risk if you're not fermenting woody materials, and its production can be mitigated through the use of pectic enzyme. Methanol IS a risk if you're starting with cheap, untaxed denatured alcohol (ethanol+methanol+bitterants+other crap) as your input, rather than the unadulterated output of a sugar fermentation, and that is mainly what gave rise to the popular methanol folklore.
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.
I...guess. But if you're drinking enough that you exceed the safe threshold for methanol consumption through its marginal presence in the distillate, while somehow managing to tolerate the ethanol, I think you've got another more pressing issue to address.
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.
"The common knowledge about methanol being a huge risk is wildly overstated…"
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.
Methanol/CH3OH/MeOH is poisonous and its consumption causes a life-threatening health crisis that often results in death or permanent blindness. As little as 100 ml of methanol can kill or cause lifelong damage to one's health.
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.
> Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.
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.)
>Another way to increase safety is to reduce the availability of illegal stills without quality control by enforcing the ban.
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.
> (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 think hard drugs being legal would greatly increase the amount of responsible consumption. Methamphetamine used to be purchaseable from any pharmacy over the counter in the US, and there was not a meth crisis at that time. Now there is.
If the original 1868 law stated $10,000, that’s insane (equivalent of millions, these days). If not, then that might mean this law has been regularly reviewed and updated, so it’s not just something that was lost in the back of the cabinet.
If laws were written by engineers, all sums of money would be expressed relative to median income.
And at that point it wouldn't be a stretch for most people to make the connection that some people are more privileged than others and fines should be relative to personal wealth and income.
Imagine if laws were written by people who know what a function is...
> A Norwegian billionaire that recorded a BAC level three times higher than the legal limit has been banned from driving and handed a 250,000 krone fine (EUR 25,000). But the fine could have been much higher as, under Norwegian law, fines are linked to monthly income and in some cases overall wealth.
> Finland has a ‘day fine’ system, with penalties linked to an offender’s wages.
The article is devoid of any meaningful legal language. It is important to note that this ruling applies only to the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi as the fifth circuit is the court that decided this. That said, when parties bring cases to other federal circuit courts, they may cite this case. Frequently, circuit decisions can impact other district courts decisions.
The court invalidated IRC Sections 5601(a)(6) and 5178(a)(1)(B), finding they go beyond Congress’s taxation powers. The court’s reasoning was that these provisions amount to an “anti revenue provision” that prevents distilled spirits from coming into existence, since under 26 U.S.C. § 5001(b) taxation begins as soon as the spirit exists, so banning production eliminates the taxable event entirely.
I like the analysis of "necessary" and "proper" sections of this opinion. Hopefully, this ruling gets expanded to other circuits and eventually leads to the US Supreme Court ignoring stare decisis with regard to wickard v filburn and let it be thrown in the dust bin of history.
Generally, majority of bans are wrong. Excessive freedom limitations limit personal development and economic growth. For thousands of years people were brewing, cooking and making things at home. People dying from car accidents, yet we do not ban cars, don't we? Because cars have major utility value plus play huge part in economy. At the same time, some forces pent decades fighting tobacco companies, destroying true American and British business icons. And somehow replaced them with proliferation all kinds of narcotics and dangerous chemical vapes, which earn huge revenues for literal potential military enemies, and with chemical sin food, water and air, which kill people more than tobacco did. Which suggests it could have been more about money/geopolitics rather than people's safety.
Ethanol is a naturally occurring substance, humans and many animals have specifically evolved ways of processing it. In moderate doses it does no harm.
It's almost impossible to avoid ingesting some alcohol during the course of a natural diet, and that includes if you avoid fermented food such as bread, let alone beverages deliberately brewed to be alcoholic.
> Ethanol is the most commonly used antidote to block the metabolising of methanol. Ethanol works by competing with the metabolic breakdown of methanol, thereby preventing the accumulation of toxic byproducts.
Home distillation is very popular in Poland too. Risk of getting poisoned from it is near zero in practice. In some parts of Poland there is more home-distilled alcohol bottles at the tables during weddings than commercial ones.
In many European countries you will be offered home-distilled drinks, you would be very unlucky to get anything else than hangover.
Anything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe.
I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.
This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.
Methanol is really only present in significant amounts in fruit mashes because it comes from fermentation of pectin. Grain or sugar-derived alcohol barely has any at all.
The foreshots you throw out do have things that taste bad and which you would not want to drink much of, but even if you mixed it all back in and got drunk, it would be the same amount of all of those chemicals you’d get if you just drank the mash, which is itself basically just beer or wine.
We distillers are a lot more likely to burn our house down than any other form of injury.
> This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.
Please do find those papers! They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with.
To be clear - methanol boils at 64C and ethanol boils at 78C. Are you suggesting that in standard distillation, there is still some non-trace methanol coming over at 78C? If I personally observed that in a laboratory setting, I'd quickly assume measurement error or external contamination.
Yes. It doesnt work the way you think. When you mix chemicals together and then boil, the result isn’t that simple.
Think of it this way: ethanol boils at 78.5. Water at 100. But when I’m distilling, the first stuff out of the still is coming out at like 80/20 ethanol to water, long before I’m near 100C. The later stuff still has some ethanol in it, even as I near 100C. (You can easily measure while distilling.)
So why would it be surprising that methanol behaved that way as well?
>To be clear - methanol boils at 64C and ethanol boils at 78C. Are you suggesting that in standard distillation, there is still some non-trace methanol coming over at 78C?
From what I remember, the highest concentration of methanol is in the tails. That should tell you everything.
I suspect that the vapor of the mash is always a mix of the components, and even above the boiling point of methanol, it still produces a mixed vapor. At room temperature, all of the components produce some vapor and will evaporate. This continues as the temperature rises.
It's not clear to me that simple distillation of a methanol/ethanol mixture can produce either pure ethanol or pure methanol at any point, just as it's impossible to distill ethanol and water to pure ethanol (absolute alcohol) if the water is above a small percentage of the mixture.
You can't distill out pure methanol, as at the boiling point of methanol ethanol also has some vapor pressure, so you distill a mix. However above that boiling point you distilled out all methanol (with a mix of ethanol), and the remaining ethanol should be free from methanol.
This also matches what happens when distilling ethanol from water. You can't distill pure ethanol, but you csn distill ethanol-free water afterwards.
Yup, distillation never produces a pure product. Cask-strength whiskeys contain quite a lot of water, even though nobody is stupid enough to distill at 100C. Even an industrial column still can't go over 96% ABV.
There is always some amount of vapor pressure, even below the boiling point of a substance. Otherwise, neither water nor alcohol would evaporate by themselves at room temperature! The temperature we call the "boiling point" is just the temperature at which the vapor pressure equals the ambient pressure.
Temperature is just an average, the individual molecules can have a higher or lower temperature and can therefore evaporate already below boiling point.
>They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with.
It's probably pot still vs. reflux still. Chemists use fractionating columns to get better separation. Home distillers won't necessarily do so, so official advice has to assume they will not.
I mean—depending how much methanol was in the mix to begin with…
It’s been a long time, but I thought there was a whole Raoult’s Law thing, about partial pressures in the vapor coming off the solution combining in proportion to each component’s molar fraction * its equilibrium vapor pressure (at that temperature, presumably). Or something.
Point being, if you’re starting with a bunch of volatiles in solution, there’d be quite a bit of smearing between fractions boiling off at any given temperature/pressure. And you’d be very unlikely to get clean fractions from a single distillation anywhere in that couple-dozen-degree range.
Probably mangled the description, but isn’t that why people do reflux columns?
I would assume it depends on what you are distilling.
If you are making brandy from clarified wine, it probably separates better than rotten grape mash.
It is still a continuum with some methanol molecules likely remaining even in the tails.
For all intents and purposes, the distiller's rule of thumb of throwing away the angels' share is still going to work because low methanol concentrations are never an issue —for the antidote for methanol is ethanol.
You throw away the foreshots because they also contain things like acetone that taste bad and may be harmful. They’re highly unpalatable so people can be relied on to do a sufficient job.
From what I understood ethanol and methanol form an azeotrope and boil together at a mixed temperature. And the going blind stuff is just prohibition propaganda both to make home distilled alcohol seem dangerous and to scapegoat the fact that the government was actively poisoning "industrial" ethanol.
methanol and ethanol do not form an azeotrope with each other, they only (both, each) bind to water. that's why separation of methanol and ethanol by holding key temperatures works at all.
furthermore, the azeotrope effect only becomes relevant at concentrations beyond 90% alcohol. so when you're producing pure methanol and ethanol, then distillation won't cut it beyond 90+% as water+(m)ethanol then *at these high concentrations* boil and evaporate together. that's the grain of truth in your statement.
last not least going blind from methanol is _very_ real.
Look at it this way:
The boiling point of ammonia is -33 C.
Would you drink a jug of household cleaning ammonia just because it's been heated to +20C?
But anyway, I don't think there's hazardous levels left after normal distillation+cutting, the reason for not buying booze from some guy behind a barn usually has more to do with lead contamination risks.
I went to Bin Inn in Masterton NZ because it was supposedly where you could recycle a certain brand of glass jar. The guy running the place clearly had no idea what I was talking about but took them anyway because he was nuts. I was looking around the place a bit as I'd never been there before, not realising he was following me. I paused to read a bottle on the shelf and suddenly he was talking very loudly over my shoulder:
You shouldn't buy those, terribly expensive.
Oh I don't really drin...
Used to be a chap in here all the time, made his own, beautiful stuff.
Ok well like I say I'm not rea...
I can sell you everything you need, you should make your own gin, much cheaper.
Oh, so did you drink his stuff too?
Nah I'd never touch it.
What but you said it was beau...
Yeah he drank it and died.
Definitely up on the list of bizarre interactions I've had here.
Hey I've been wanting to get into home distilling for years but haven't found any good resources to start. Do you know of any books or other print resources that I should look at to learn what I need to learn before starting?
This doesn’t make sense. Whether or not you have methanol depends on what you are distilling from. Distillation doesn’t create methanol and many sources of ethanol contain negligible methanol.
TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.
As distillation continues the concentration of methanol drops.
The highest concentration is at the start. This is also generally full of undesirable flavours.
People also forget that ethanol competitively inhibits metabolism of methanol in a way that protects healthy adults from toxicity.
A safe alcoholic drink can have methanol in it, iirc it's about 80:1 ethanol:methanol by EU rules. And generally considered tolerable [0].
What is actually toxic is much higher ratios of methanol than that.
Unless you have severely f'd up your fermentables you shouldn't even have that much methanol in the starter!
This is why everyone is disagreeing with the safety in this thread.
It's also why people wonder why so many tourist destinations have been mixing methanol into alcoholic drinks. They probably could serve drunk people high concentrations relying on ethanol already in their blood and follow up drinks to stop noticeable harm.
Probably most adults could drink 5-10% methanol (if ethanol is about 50%) and never notice the toxicity.
Good question, I think it's to get people drunk and buying more drinks.
As opposed to the crowd sobering up and leaving.
But also I believe the bar (staff) often genuinely don't know what their serving is harmful.
I should have added the limit to safety at low levels of methanol is actually that your body processes ethanol much faster than methanol. So it's more that the crowd goes home and then hours later (once ethanol has been cleared) the methanol finally is picked up by the enzymes that makes it toxic. If they stay drunk (on ethanol) for days the methanol might have been excreted before being toxified.
If places are really sketchy, they might be mixing in partially treated industrial or "denatured" alcohol, which has poisonous quantities of methanol and bitterants but are also like 90% ethanol
I've never tasted it but from what I remember from high school chemistry class, it certainly smelled close enough to other alcohols, so I assume it would taste close enough as well.
TBH, I also had to do my own bit of googling because I barely drink alcohol to begin with, but it does look like "at the start", it's not very distinguishable from ethanol in taste and in effect.
If ethanol and methanol were readily distinguishable by taste, much fewer people would have died or gone blind drinking moonshine.
Whatever subtle differences exist between them are probably unnoticeable to people who are already drunk, not to mention drinking cocktails with all sorts of other flavors mixed in.
It seems to parse just fine? They create some unknown mixture of methanol/ethanol (who knows what the ratio is, who cares, like you said, depends what you're making it from) and then raise it past the boiling point of methanol, throwing away everything that comes over while still under the boiling point of ethanol. It sounds like basic distillation to me.
Distilling at home was fairly traditional long before high alcohol prices. Sure, high prices encourages some folks and helps ensure there is space for a black market. But technically, the high prices didn't cause distilling.
I visited Norway and was blown away by the price of alcohol. Given that the sun only comes out for a fraction of an hour in winter I struggled to believe it. At a local bar... (I think I was in trondheim?) I asked how they afforded booze? (it worked out to 15$ USD per pint), "We don't, but we do it anyways"
Yes. Wine with between 10-15% alcohol by volume[1] currently has a tax of 5,41 NOK per percent ABV per liter. So a typical 0.75 liter bottle of 12% ABV wine gets a tax of 12*0.75 = 53.19 NOK, or about $5.6 / €4.8.
For booze above 22% ABV the tax is currently 9.23 NOK. So a 0.7 liter bottle of 40% ABV Whiskey or similar would get 258 NOK or $27 / €23 in tax.
And on top of that comes the usual 25% VAT, and high wages to our bartenders etc.
Prices tend to correlate strongly with wages and wages are very high in Norway for all work, so they also have some of the highest prices on basically everything. Another lol example is a Big Mac combo meal in Oslo - you're looking at around $20.
Is that in Oslo or elsewhere? Have prices gone down for some reason?
EDIT: Ahh! I was basing my statement on data from quite a number of years back, and just assuming prices tend to go in one direction in inflationary economies. The nuance here is that the NOK has weakened somewhat dramatically against the dollar, so relative prices aren't quite as insane now as they were in the past.
Scandinavian countries have very specific alcohol policies, though, very restrictionist, and the tax is part of this.
This is not just question of "more expensive country, more expensive stuff". Switzerland or Luxembourg are quite expensive, but you will buy affordable and good Italian/Spanish/French wine there, because these countries don't impose anywhere near as much taxation on wine.
Edit: According to AI, I've got this a bit backwards. The ruling hits the taxing power, not the commerce clause. It's nonetheless interesting, since the machine gun ban may be affected.
The court says that you can't use a tax to ban something outright, which is what the post-1986 machine gun ban is: refusing to collect a tax on post-1986 machine guns, effectively banning them.
That leaves the commerce clause as the remaining defense for all taxes-as-bans or general outright bans. And that suggests future cases where Wickard will be under scrutiny.
---
I am not a lawyer, but I think this ruling is far more interesting than it appears.
It is aiming a crosshair at Wickard v. Filburn, which ruled that a farmer that produced wheat on his farm to exclusively to feed livestock on that same farm was affecting interstate commerce, and could be penalized for overproduction to support price controls. Keep in mind, that this definition of "interstate commerce" is so broad that it essentially reduces the category of "intra-state commerce" to nothing, which seems dubious.
That ruling is the basis of a huge portion of the federal government's powers under the commerce clause of the constitution.
The supreme court will likely have to rule on this eventually, and how it threads the needle will be very important.
If Wickard were simply struck down, the U.S. would be reformed into a weak federation, akin perhaps to pre-EU Europe, where laws vary wildly between states, and the federal government has little power. No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.
That's unlikely to happen, but the court would either have to reaffirm Wickard, or would have to come up with a new standard to keep, say, the $200 tax on pre-1986 machine guns effective (preventing a garage machine gun), but allow some notion of non-economic activity like home distilling to continue.
The OBBB reduced the tax on suppressors to $0, which strongly undermines the idea that home production of suppressors can be regulated by Wickard, since there is no tax interest to protect.
How it might affect the controlled substances act is more complicated, since there is no tax on illegal drugs, and the government has decided to entirely ban non-pharmaceutical street drugs, hence even "hobby" production clearly undermines that policy.
It's an area with lots of apparent but longstanding contradictions and questionable standards, but it would upend much of the New Deal to reverse it.
You’re confusing a few of the issues here. This isn’t an interstate commerce case, it’s a tax power case, which does reflect on the NFA but not on Wickard v Filburn or civil rights. The important aspects of federal civil rights law aren’t legally justified by the commerce clause either.
Though I would gladly see Wickard v Filburn overturned. Commercial regulations already vary by state, and the US would still be more cohesive than the EU is today, but the amount of water that flows through my showerhead doesn’t have to be a concern of the federal government. In fact, we don’t even need Wickard v Filburn to be a more cohesive federation than Canada, which doesn’t even have free trade between provinces.
Another quick look at your history also tells you why a strong federal government has downsides. Life is full of compromises, but I like me some subsidiarity.
I mean you said it yourself, it's a compromise. Giving the states free reign to terrorise their populations didn't work out so great. The relatively strong federal government of more recent times however seems to have worked out not so badly. Now there's a retarded paedohpile in office starting random wars and of course all bets are off. The US political system actually probably is quite shit, but I don't think it's about centralisation vs decentralisation, but electing an unaccountable king every 4 years is just a retarded and easily exploitable system.
> Giving the states free reign to terrorise their populations didn't work out so great.
Be careful not to be anachronistic. When the US was a young country, before telegraphs and railways were widespread, most people's primary interface with the government was perhaps their municipality or at the highest level perhaps their county.
> The relatively strong federal government of more recent times however seems to have worked out not so badly.
I am not so sure. Different people in different parts of the country have different preferences. Much easier to satisfy them, if you don't centralise too much.
> [...] but electing an unaccountable king every 4 years is just a retarded and easily exploitable system.
Much better to elect 3,143 kings, one for every county. If you don't like the one your neighbours (and you) voted for, just move to the next town over.
Moving counties is almost infinitely easier than moving countries, or replacing the entire federal bureaucracy to your liking (instead of the liking of that other guy).
Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. Outside the compound, the locally-distilled "sid" is on offer. Both varieties have been available for a half-century with no reports of poisoning.
Why would you drink an undistllled beverage, do you mean alcohol free ?
I remember being in college a lot of Muslim kids coming to our parties drinking alcohol because we didn’t care and asking us not to tell anyone…Sake is wonderful.
That’s actually a common myth perpetuated by the American government during prohibition. The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch to blind people, then they told people they’d go blind from moonshine to discourage it.
Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them. The ratio of ethanol to methanol in a distilled spirit will be approximately the same as in the wash it was distilled from. Drinking brandy you’ll get about the same ratio as if you drank the wine it was made from.
You need the same amount of ethanol to get drunk regardless of how you drink it, all distilling does is get rid of that pesky water that’s in beer and wine. (That makes some other fun things like barrel aging possible.) So you’ll also get the same amount of methanol.
Also fun fact: if you got methanol poisoning and went to the hospital the treatment is ethanol, because it blocks the metabolism of methanol. Methanol metabolizes into formic acid which damages the optic nerve.
And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.
You’d have to try hard to seriously injure yourself drinking home distilled spirits. (I’ve been doing it for 15 years.) Unless you count just drinking too much, but you’d have that problem with the professional stuff too.
>And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.
This is wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.
If it works that way, why doesn’t ethanol come off the still entirely and then water? There’s over a 20 degree gap between their boiling points and yet anyone who has ever distilled will tell you that they see a mix that’s at least 20% water at the very start. (You measure as you go along.) This is still well below the azeotropic mix too.
And, later on in distillation, when you’re much closer to the boiling point of water than ethanol, there will still be some ethanol coming out.
I get why you think that, I did too before diving deeper, but I assure you, your mental model of how distillation works is incorrect.
Having seperate boiling points wont matter if they form into an azeotrope. Not all liquids can be distilled from one another even though every liquid has a different boiling point.
how did that work? did the Feds pose as some false flag bootleggers?
do you have some sources I could read up on?
thing is, russia has a large tradition of home distillation (samogonka), and they too have tropes of people going blind. there have been a lot of cases of people dying because of bad alcohol, here's somewhat recent case: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/contaminated-cider-deaths-russi...
It’s quite common for people to add methanol to illegal liquor because it can be made cheaply from natural gas and is sold industrially everywhere. You are much more likely to be injured buying bootleg alcohol than making it.
"Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them."
This doesn't sound quite right. Distillation concentrates alcohols as a function of their boiling points and the temperature. Heavier alcohols have higher boiling points so methanol will be distilled faster than ethanol. This means that it is can become more concentrated in the distillate. The idea that the relative proportion of compounds can change is the whole idea of distillation in the first place. To be fair, people have been distilling alcohols just fine for a few hundred years now so clearly this can be done safely with primitive technology. But is definitely possible to increase the methanol concentration relative to ethanol through distillation and it should definitely come off the still first if you just apply heat.
Huh, I thought if you held the outlet of the still at 79c until you stopped getting distillate then you could be reasonably sure that you took out most of the the majority of the methanol.
It’s more prevalent, and you might reduce the ratio of it, I was just pointing out that more than you expect will remain in even after tossing the fores.
And even if you just distilled until it was basically water coming out, then re-blended everything, you have not significantly worsened the ratio of the two
Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.
North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.
>North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation.
I find it interesting that you have this notion. I was born in 1984. The history books in school were still implying that home distillation was dangerous. "Rot gut whiskey" "bath tub gin" are phrases that continue to come to mind when I think of the prohibition days.
No one I have ever met in all of the different levels of society here have had any strong disdain or distrust of home brewing or distillation. By the time of my upbringing, at least, the general population in the US was content with the alcohol laws. They are not aware of how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are. They are not aware of the post prohibition three tier system. They are consumers of alcohol not producers. That is what prohibition in the US did. "House wine" in the US is the wine a restaurant picks for cheap profits. "House wine" in the old days or in europe is wine you make at home. We, in general, lost that piece of culture with prohibition. It never disappeared in some parts of the country though. Appalachia moonshiners kept the tradition going in mind and spirit for the whole country.
If your statement was about other drugs, you would be spot on. Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata. Prohibition of other drugs is a different story for cultural reasons.
In the modern world they don’t have to be. I’m not sure a bubbling still in every home is a great idea but they won’t be wood fired so that’s a start. You could also test alcohol cheaply these days for the poisonous alcohols.
Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free
That’s because they adulterate it with methanol. Methanol can be derived from natural gas cheaply. I wrote a long comment above about why this isn’t a risk with home distilling.
The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor. The fire codes for a distillery are very strict.
> The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor.
This would suggest that using induction heating would be significantly safer and have the possibility of precise temperature control. Is there any reason why home distilling does/does not do this?
Electric heating does reduce the risk of fire, yes, and some of us do it. (It’s also just a lot easier than a turkey fryer.) I rigged a water heater element up for this purpose.
(Technically there actually isn’t temperature control in distilling, the temperature is just the boiling point of the mixture, which changes over time as the mixture changes from distillation, but you do control the heat input which effects the speed at which you distill. Tangential, but counterintuitive.)
The reason most don’t is just cost/practicality. You really need to have a fair bit of liquid to get good results. Like tenish gallons (~40L). You probably can’t fit a still that big on your stovetop (and you really want to do this outside anyway) and you’d need a 240v connection to provide enough heat. Your standard American wall outlet doesn’t provide enough juice.
But the standard 240v 50a you charge an EV with or, in my case, plug in your RV does. People run drier cords out a window too.
Yeah, the thing is as you distill you’re saving it bit by bit as you go along. You toss out the very first stuff (called foreshots) because it contains a number of chemicals with lower boiling points you don’t want (methanol, acetone, etc.) in higher concentration.
Then you get the heads, hearts, and tails and blend them together according to taste. You just wouldn’t get much separation if you distilled a small amount unless you were collecting in really tiny quantities.
So it just becomes harder to do a good job with a small amount.
I find this line of thinking fascinating considering how many things we do without a second thought (forced to drive for basic errands, etc.) that are orders of magnitude more dangerous.
Anyway, my point is that the people most at risk of poisoning themselves are those unfamiliar with the process. I'm pretty sure a ton of people were doing this anyway for non-commercial purposes without realizing an unenforced federal law even existed.
A colleague from the region explained to me that if the booze is cheap, you just make sure you drink plenty of good booze too. Blocks the metabolic pathway.
Yes, that is true. But almost no one really does this, cutting the head is what is usually done and I have never heard of someone poisoning themselves with homemade țuică. It's fine, really. It seems USians are convinced homemade hooch will blind you without having absolutely no personal experience with it.
Depends what you make it from. If you distill eight litres of wine into about a litre brandy without removing methanol, it has the same amount of methanol than eight litres of wine did. Given the average of 150mg/l of methanol in red wine, this puts it to about 1g of methanol in that amount. That is not healthy, but you need to keep in mind ingestion of alcohol slows down the metabolism of methanol through competition and the methanol will be excreted by your kidneys instead of being metabolized.
So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.
The eastern part of Czechia (Moravia) plus Slovakia will distill anything that grows, too, and methanol poisonings are almost non-existent here. Don't underestimate centuries of tradition and know-how.
The only exception was a methanol affair 15 years ago, but that had nothing to do with home distillation. In that particular case, two bozos inspired by a badly understood Wikipedia article bought and mixed enormous amounts of industrial methanol with ethanol and sold the resulting mixture on the black market, killing dozens of people and triggering a temporary prohibition as the authorities scrambled to find all the poisoned booze.
Not underestimating, but I've seen first hand how these are made, from my uncles and neighbours as I'm from rural Romania. The equipment may not be clean, people tend to get drunk because QA is literally drinking it and that affects the next batch, the precursor fruits could be half rotten, etc. I appreciate homemade spirits because of the genuine taste, but be aware of the conditions they're made in.
That (CSA) falls under regulating interstate commerce instead of tax powers. Picking up a flower and smoking it on the spot is interstate commerce thus i dont think this same idea applies.
This is bad information. The precursors being legal doesn’t mean anything about the legality of producing scheduled drugs from them. The precursors for home distilling are also legal.
Possessing schedule I controlled substances is illegal. If you grow the substance, you also possess it. Therefore it’s not legal.
The Commerce Clause issue is raised in our other case[1] that's now pending before the Sixth Circuit.
(I argued both cases.)
[0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-10760-CV0.pd...
[1] https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/issues/detail/ream-v-us-dep...
[0] https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/library/docLib/2025-06-24-T...
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.
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.
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?
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.
If many people started doing stupid things though then yes it would raise premiums for all.
US insurers can only discriminate by age and smoking status.
But I guess that might be the debate line of which you spoke.
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
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?
Obviously there are downsides too, but booze is popular for very good reasons.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium
The intent is not to poison people, since the alcohol is not intended for consumption.
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).
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.
This was literally the basis of one of the first conflicts of the early federal government.
If you find yourself drinking something untrustworthy you can at least cure yourself with a chaser of an equivalent amount of everclear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity#Treatment
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.
https://doi.org/10.1053/j.ajkd.2016.02.058
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
If the original 1868 law stated $10,000, that’s insane (equivalent of millions, these days). If not, then that might mean this law has been regularly reviewed and updated, so it’s not just something that was lost in the back of the cabinet.
And at that point it wouldn't be a stretch for most people to make the connection that some people are more privileged than others and fines should be relative to personal wealth and income.
Imagine if laws were written by people who know what a function is...
If laws were written by engineers, money would hold its value, and the laws wouldn't require constant adjustment.
https://www.afsa.gov.au/professionals/resource-hub/penalty-u...
> A Norwegian billionaire that recorded a BAC level three times higher than the legal limit has been banned from driving and handed a 250,000 krone fine (EUR 25,000). But the fine could have been much higher as, under Norwegian law, fines are linked to monthly income and in some cases overall wealth.
> Finland has a ‘day fine’ system, with penalties linked to an offender’s wages.
Here are the official docs for the case
McNutt v. US Department of Justice
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca5.220...
Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
It's almost impossible to avoid ingesting some alcohol during the course of a natural diet, and that includes if you avoid fermented food such as bread, let alone beverages deliberately brewed to be alcoholic.
Edit: only one way round! This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I am not your doctor or drinking doula.
> Ethanol is the most commonly used antidote to block the metabolising of methanol. Ethanol works by competing with the metabolic breakdown of methanol, thereby preventing the accumulation of toxic byproducts.
MSF: https://methanolpoisoning.msf.org/en/for-health-professional...
I can see the ambiguity of my comment. I was trying to phrase as a riddle but can be interpreted both ways.
In many European countries you will be offered home-distilled drinks, you would be very unlucky to get anything else than hangover.
The problem is overblown.
I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.
Methanol is really only present in significant amounts in fruit mashes because it comes from fermentation of pectin. Grain or sugar-derived alcohol barely has any at all.
The foreshots you throw out do have things that taste bad and which you would not want to drink much of, but even if you mixed it all back in and got drunk, it would be the same amount of all of those chemicals you’d get if you just drank the mash, which is itself basically just beer or wine.
We distillers are a lot more likely to burn our house down than any other form of injury.
Please do find those papers! They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with.
To be clear - methanol boils at 64C and ethanol boils at 78C. Are you suggesting that in standard distillation, there is still some non-trace methanol coming over at 78C? If I personally observed that in a laboratory setting, I'd quickly assume measurement error or external contamination.
Think of it this way: ethanol boils at 78.5. Water at 100. But when I’m distilling, the first stuff out of the still is coming out at like 80/20 ethanol to water, long before I’m near 100C. The later stuff still has some ethanol in it, even as I near 100C. (You can easily measure while distilling.)
So why would it be surprising that methanol behaved that way as well?
From what I remember, the highest concentration of methanol is in the tails. That should tell you everything.
*EDIT* Found the paper
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0b9...
It's not clear to me that simple distillation of a methanol/ethanol mixture can produce either pure ethanol or pure methanol at any point, just as it's impossible to distill ethanol and water to pure ethanol (absolute alcohol) if the water is above a small percentage of the mixture.
This also matches what happens when distilling ethanol from water. You can't distill pure ethanol, but you csn distill ethanol-free water afterwards.
There is always some amount of vapor pressure, even below the boiling point of a substance. Otherwise, neither water nor alcohol would evaporate by themselves at room temperature! The temperature we call the "boiling point" is just the temperature at which the vapor pressure equals the ambient pressure.
Temperature is just an average, the individual molecules can have a higher or lower temperature and can therefore evaporate already below boiling point.
It's probably pot still vs. reflux still. Chemists use fractionating columns to get better separation. Home distillers won't necessarily do so, so official advice has to assume they will not.
It’s been a long time, but I thought there was a whole Raoult’s Law thing, about partial pressures in the vapor coming off the solution combining in proportion to each component’s molar fraction * its equilibrium vapor pressure (at that temperature, presumably). Or something.
Point being, if you’re starting with a bunch of volatiles in solution, there’d be quite a bit of smearing between fractions boiling off at any given temperature/pressure. And you’d be very unlikely to get clean fractions from a single distillation anywhere in that couple-dozen-degree range.
Probably mangled the description, but isn’t that why people do reflux columns?
If you are making brandy from clarified wine, it probably separates better than rotten grape mash.
It is still a continuum with some methanol molecules likely remaining even in the tails.
For all intents and purposes, the distiller's rule of thumb of throwing away the angels' share is still going to work because low methanol concentrations are never an issue —for the antidote for methanol is ethanol.
You can’t distill ethanol to higher than 95% because of the 95-5 ethanol-water azeotrope that boils at 78.2C, versus ethanol alone at 78.4C.
Methanol-water and methanol-ethanol don’t form an azeotrope so if properly done you can separate methanol via distillation.
methanol and ethanol do not form an azeotrope with each other, they only (both, each) bind to water. that's why separation of methanol and ethanol by holding key temperatures works at all.
furthermore, the azeotrope effect only becomes relevant at concentrations beyond 90% alcohol. so when you're producing pure methanol and ethanol, then distillation won't cut it beyond 90+% as water+(m)ethanol then *at these high concentrations* boil and evaporate together. that's the grain of truth in your statement.
last not least going blind from methanol is _very_ real.
I don't think so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope_tables
But anyway, I don't think there's hazardous levels left after normal distillation+cutting, the reason for not buying booze from some guy behind a barn usually has more to do with lead contamination risks.
You shouldn't buy those, terribly expensive. Oh I don't really drin... Used to be a chap in here all the time, made his own, beautiful stuff. Ok well like I say I'm not rea... I can sell you everything you need, you should make your own gin, much cheaper. Oh, so did you drink his stuff too? Nah I'd never touch it. What but you said it was beau... Yeah he drank it and died.
Definitely up on the list of bizarre interactions I've had here.
do you mean distills? decanting is just pouring carefully
TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.
As distillation continues the concentration of methanol drops.
The highest concentration is at the start. This is also generally full of undesirable flavours.
People also forget that ethanol competitively inhibits metabolism of methanol in a way that protects healthy adults from toxicity.
A safe alcoholic drink can have methanol in it, iirc it's about 80:1 ethanol:methanol by EU rules. And generally considered tolerable [0].
What is actually toxic is much higher ratios of methanol than that.
Unless you have severely f'd up your fermentables you shouldn't even have that much methanol in the starter!
This is why everyone is disagreeing with the safety in this thread.
It's also why people wonder why so many tourist destinations have been mixing methanol into alcoholic drinks. They probably could serve drunk people high concentrations relying on ethanol already in their blood and follow up drinks to stop noticeable harm.
Probably most adults could drink 5-10% methanol (if ethanol is about 50%) and never notice the toxicity.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11926610/
As opposed to the crowd sobering up and leaving.
But also I believe the bar (staff) often genuinely don't know what their serving is harmful.
I should have added the limit to safety at low levels of methanol is actually that your body processes ethanol much faster than methanol. So it's more that the crowd goes home and then hours later (once ethanol has been cleared) the methanol finally is picked up by the enzymes that makes it toxic. If they stay drunk (on ethanol) for days the methanol might have been excreted before being toxified.
So maybe the answer is water down the shots of your obviously drunk customers.
TBH, I also had to do my own bit of googling because I barely drink alcohol to begin with, but it does look like "at the start", it's not very distinguishable from ethanol in taste and in effect.
Whatever subtle differences exist between them are probably unnoticeable to people who are already drunk, not to mention drinking cocktails with all sorts of other flavors mixed in.
And I'll let you know that my shortest days are 4.5 hours long (with weak sunlight!). Oslo has slighly longer days still.
For booze above 22% ABV the tax is currently 9.23 NOK. So a 0.7 liter bottle of 40% ABV Whiskey or similar would get 258 NOK or $27 / €23 in tax.
And on top of that comes the usual 25% VAT, and high wages to our bartenders etc.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume
It's actually relatively cheap right now, I expect a price hike soon given how much grocery prices have increased.
EDIT: Ahh! I was basing my statement on data from quite a number of years back, and just assuming prices tend to go in one direction in inflationary economies. The nuance here is that the NOK has weakened somewhat dramatically against the dollar, so relative prices aren't quite as insane now as they were in the past.
This is not just question of "more expensive country, more expensive stuff". Switzerland or Luxembourg are quite expensive, but you will buy affordable and good Italian/Spanish/French wine there, because these countries don't impose anywhere near as much taxation on wine.
The court says that you can't use a tax to ban something outright, which is what the post-1986 machine gun ban is: refusing to collect a tax on post-1986 machine guns, effectively banning them.
That leaves the commerce clause as the remaining defense for all taxes-as-bans or general outright bans. And that suggests future cases where Wickard will be under scrutiny.
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I am not a lawyer, but I think this ruling is far more interesting than it appears.
It is aiming a crosshair at Wickard v. Filburn, which ruled that a farmer that produced wheat on his farm to exclusively to feed livestock on that same farm was affecting interstate commerce, and could be penalized for overproduction to support price controls. Keep in mind, that this definition of "interstate commerce" is so broad that it essentially reduces the category of "intra-state commerce" to nothing, which seems dubious.
That ruling is the basis of a huge portion of the federal government's powers under the commerce clause of the constitution.
The supreme court will likely have to rule on this eventually, and how it threads the needle will be very important.
If Wickard were simply struck down, the U.S. would be reformed into a weak federation, akin perhaps to pre-EU Europe, where laws vary wildly between states, and the federal government has little power. No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.
That's unlikely to happen, but the court would either have to reaffirm Wickard, or would have to come up with a new standard to keep, say, the $200 tax on pre-1986 machine guns effective (preventing a garage machine gun), but allow some notion of non-economic activity like home distilling to continue.
The OBBB reduced the tax on suppressors to $0, which strongly undermines the idea that home production of suppressors can be regulated by Wickard, since there is no tax interest to protect.
How it might affect the controlled substances act is more complicated, since there is no tax on illegal drugs, and the government has decided to entirely ban non-pharmaceutical street drugs, hence even "hobby" production clearly undermines that policy.
It's an area with lots of apparent but longstanding contradictions and questionable standards, but it would upend much of the New Deal to reverse it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Though I would gladly see Wickard v Filburn overturned. Commercial regulations already vary by state, and the US would still be more cohesive than the EU is today, but the amount of water that flows through my showerhead doesn’t have to be a concern of the federal government. In fact, we don’t even need Wickard v Filburn to be a more cohesive federation than Canada, which doesn’t even have free trade between provinces.
States can still do civil rights etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
Be careful not to be anachronistic. When the US was a young country, before telegraphs and railways were widespread, most people's primary interface with the government was perhaps their municipality or at the highest level perhaps their county.
> The relatively strong federal government of more recent times however seems to have worked out not so badly.
I am not so sure. Different people in different parts of the country have different preferences. Much easier to satisfy them, if you don't centralise too much.
> [...] but electing an unaccountable king every 4 years is just a retarded and easily exploitable system.
Much better to elect 3,143 kings, one for every county. If you don't like the one your neighbours (and you) voted for, just move to the next town over.
How so? For medical reasons? For the facilitation of the Saudi Aramco oil production which funds the life and habitation of humans in Dhahran?
I suspect something was lost in translation.
I remember being in college a lot of Muslim kids coming to our parties drinking alcohol because we didn’t care and asking us not to tell anyone…Sake is wonderful.
Many people enjoy drinking beer and wine. These are undistilled.
Vodka and whiskey are examples of distilled beverages.
Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them. The ratio of ethanol to methanol in a distilled spirit will be approximately the same as in the wash it was distilled from. Drinking brandy you’ll get about the same ratio as if you drank the wine it was made from.
You need the same amount of ethanol to get drunk regardless of how you drink it, all distilling does is get rid of that pesky water that’s in beer and wine. (That makes some other fun things like barrel aging possible.) So you’ll also get the same amount of methanol.
Also fun fact: if you got methanol poisoning and went to the hospital the treatment is ethanol, because it blocks the metabolism of methanol. Methanol metabolizes into formic acid which damages the optic nerve.
And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.
You’d have to try hard to seriously injure yourself drinking home distilled spirits. (I’ve been doing it for 15 years.) Unless you count just drinking too much, but you’d have that problem with the professional stuff too.
This is wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.
And, later on in distillation, when you’re much closer to the boiling point of water than ethanol, there will still be some ethanol coming out.
I get why you think that, I did too before diving deeper, but I assure you, your mental model of how distillation works is incorrect.
Oversimplified might be a better description but there needs to be a rule even dumb people can use
So the rule is: discard whatever comes first
If you expect every home distiller to understand the nuances of this you're going to end up with a lot of "accidents"
how did that work? did the Feds pose as some false flag bootleggers? do you have some sources I could read up on?
thing is, russia has a large tradition of home distillation (samogonka), and they too have tropes of people going blind. there have been a lot of cases of people dying because of bad alcohol, here's somewhat recent case: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/contaminated-cider-deaths-russi...
It’s quite common for people to add methanol to illegal liquor because it can be made cheaply from natural gas and is sold industrially everywhere. You are much more likely to be injured buying bootleg alcohol than making it.
And even if you just distilled until it was basically water coming out, then re-blended everything, you have not significantly worsened the ratio of the two
North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.
I find it interesting that you have this notion. I was born in 1984. The history books in school were still implying that home distillation was dangerous. "Rot gut whiskey" "bath tub gin" are phrases that continue to come to mind when I think of the prohibition days.
No one I have ever met in all of the different levels of society here have had any strong disdain or distrust of home brewing or distillation. By the time of my upbringing, at least, the general population in the US was content with the alcohol laws. They are not aware of how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are. They are not aware of the post prohibition three tier system. They are consumers of alcohol not producers. That is what prohibition in the US did. "House wine" in the US is the wine a restaurant picks for cheap profits. "House wine" in the old days or in europe is wine you make at home. We, in general, lost that piece of culture with prohibition. It never disappeared in some parts of the country though. Appalachia moonshiners kept the tradition going in mind and spirit for the whole country.
If your statement was about other drugs, you would be spot on. Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata. Prohibition of other drugs is a different story for cultural reasons.
It's very difficult to ban something when even the police do it. I'm guessing that the number of cops who like a drink is somewhere around "most".
Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free
The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor. The fire codes for a distillery are very strict.
This would suggest that using induction heating would be significantly safer and have the possibility of precise temperature control. Is there any reason why home distilling does/does not do this?
(Technically there actually isn’t temperature control in distilling, the temperature is just the boiling point of the mixture, which changes over time as the mixture changes from distillation, but you do control the heat input which effects the speed at which you distill. Tangential, but counterintuitive.)
The reason most don’t is just cost/practicality. You really need to have a fair bit of liquid to get good results. Like tenish gallons (~40L). You probably can’t fit a still that big on your stovetop (and you really want to do this outside anyway) and you’d need a 240v connection to provide enough heat. Your standard American wall outlet doesn’t provide enough juice.
But the standard 240v 50a you charge an EV with or, in my case, plug in your RV does. People run drier cords out a window too.
Ah, that would do it. I was thinking this was like beer homebrewing and would be around a gallon.
Thanks for the info.
Then you get the heads, hearts, and tails and blend them together according to taste. You just wouldn’t get much separation if you distilled a small amount unless you were collecting in really tiny quantities.
So it just becomes harder to do a good job with a small amount.
normal hooch is dangerous, too.
Anyway, my point is that the people most at risk of poisoning themselves are those unfamiliar with the process. I'm pretty sure a ton of people were doing this anyway for non-commercial purposes without realizing an unenforced federal law even existed.
A colleague from the region explained to me that if the booze is cheap, you just make sure you drink plenty of good booze too. Blocks the metabolic pathway.
So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.
The only exception was a methanol affair 15 years ago, but that had nothing to do with home distillation. In that particular case, two bozos inspired by a badly understood Wikipedia article bought and mixed enormous amounts of industrial methanol with ethanol and sold the resulting mixture on the black market, killing dozens of people and triggering a temporary prohibition as the authorities scrambled to find all the poisoned booze.
They are now both serving life.
Same could be said about food: dishes, knives etc. Anyway the high temperature should kill some of the germs.
> the precursor fruits could be half rotten
So what?
We also had some cases of crap being sold, but that's a different thing.
Possessing schedule I controlled substances is illegal. If you grow the substance, you also possess it. Therefore it’s not legal.
Do be careful. Depending on the state mushrooms become illegal at different stages of production.