Comment by fzeindl
11 hours ago
In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.
Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
11 hours ago
In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.
Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
Alcohol is always poisonous (but mixed with methanol quite a bit more poisonous ) :-)
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.
And if you have one of those poisons the antedote is the other one.
Edit: only one way round! This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I am not your doctor or drinking doula.
you suggest additional drinking methanol when you're "normally" drunk?? that's dangerously counterfactual.
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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.
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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.
>Anything that decants below 78.4C
do you mean distills? decanting is just pouring carefully
Yeah. No idea why I wrote decant.
Thank you for asking, I was so confused.
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.
Everyone is talking in circles.
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/
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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.
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?
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.
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.
The problem is overblown.
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"
The real answer: Folks rarely get very drunk at the bar. Folks have drinks at home, go to the bar and drink modestly, and drink after.
And I'll let you know that my shortest days are 4.5 hours long (with weak sunlight!). Oslo has slighly longer days still.
Why is it so expensive? High vice taxes?
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume
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.
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