Comment by jandrewrogers
11 hours ago
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/
Genuine q then. Why don't the destinations serve watered down shots instead? If it is just to save money.
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
Probably because a- people can tell, and b- you sell more to already drunk people, so getting them drunk sooner is better.
So maybe the answer is water down the shots of your obviously drunk customers.
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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.