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.
> how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are
They're not technically complex, but you need space and time for them, and producing a beer you would actually want to drink and bottling it isn't trivial.
I know one guy who moonshines for family-and-friends consumption, not sale, and I'll pass. It's not that much cheaper than just buying it (note: my state alcohol taxes are not that high) and it's a lot more work. I might make a batch of wine -> brandy from fruits that grew on a tree in my back yard if I had plums, just to say I did, but I'm not interested in making a big batch of corn liquor.
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?
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.
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.
Yes
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"
[dead]
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.
2 replies →
> The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch
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...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fac...
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
You can. I think parent is using some technicality of how distillation is not going to get you to 100.0000% purity.
Interesting one.
Experienced distiller here. This comment is spot on.
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.
> how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are
They're not technically complex, but you need space and time for them, and producing a beer you would actually want to drink and bottling it isn't trivial.
I know one guy who moonshines for family-and-friends consumption, not sale, and I'll pass. It's not that much cheaper than just buying it (note: my state alcohol taxes are not that high) and it's a lot more work. I might make a batch of wine -> brandy from fruits that grew on a tree in my back yard if I had plums, just to say I did, but I'm not interested in making a big batch of corn liquor.
>Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata.
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".
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?
3 replies →
well, poisonous.
normal hooch is dangerous, too.
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.
Meh, home distilled spirits are everywhere in Romania. I drank many many times home distilled spirits. They are not that dangerous.
This reads as authenticity Eastern European.
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.
1 reply →
How's your eyesight?
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.
They are now both serving life.
3 replies →
Not great, but I'm not blind.
Looks like they didn't see your comment
I'm sure availability of testing methods and equipment has come a long way since the 1860s. As well as quality and purity of materials.