Comment by RealityVoid
10 hours ago
Meh, home distilled spirits are everywhere in Romania. I drank many many times home distilled spirits. They are not that dangerous.
10 hours ago
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.
Here in New Zealand it’s legal, and I trade my honey for honey gin.
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.
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.
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It's the same in Romania. Basically there shouldn't be any issues with drinking home made alcohol, it's like eating a home made cake.
We also had some cases of crap being sold, but that's a different thing.
Not great, but I'm not blind.
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