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I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.

by d--b 6mo ago

serf 6mo ago
well, poisonous. normal hooch is dangerous, too.
sublinear 6mo ago
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.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
smackeyacky 6mo ago
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
- mattmaroon 6mo ago
  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.
  - bsder 6mo ago
    > 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?
    - mattmaroon 6mo ago
      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.
      - bsder 6mo ago
        > Like tenish gallons (~40L). Ah, that would do it. I was thinking this was like beer homebrewing and would be around a gallon. Thanks for the info.
        mattmaroon 6mo ago
        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.
mattmaroon 6mo ago
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.
- awesomeusername 6mo ago
  Experienced distiller here. This comment is spot on.
- frankzander 6mo ago
  Interesting one.
- 3eb7988a1663 6mo ago
  >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.
  - 6mo ago
themafia 6mo ago
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.
RealityVoid 6mo ago
Meh, home distilled spirits are everywhere in Romania. I drank many many times home distilled spirits. They are not that dangerous.
- ihalip 6mo ago
  How's your eyesight?
  - jimnotgym 6mo ago
    Looks like they didn't see your comment
  - ane 6mo ago
    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.
  - RealityVoid 6mo ago
    Not great, but I'm not blind.
  - inglor_cz 6mo ago
    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.
retrac 6mo ago
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.
- ghastmaster 6mo ago
  >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.
  - razakel 6mo ago
    >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".

I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.

by d--b 6mo ago

I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.

serf 6mo ago

well, poisonous. normal hooch is dangerous, too.

sublinear 6mo ago

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.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

smackeyacky 6mo ago

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

mattmaroon 6mo ago
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.
- bsder 6mo ago
  > 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?
  - mattmaroon 6mo ago
    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.
    - bsder 6mo ago
      > Like tenish gallons (~40L). Ah, that would do it. I was thinking this was like beer homebrewing and would be around a gallon. Thanks for the info.
      - mattmaroon 6mo ago
        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.

mattmaroon 6mo ago

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.

awesomeusername 6mo ago
Experienced distiller here. This comment is spot on.
frankzander 6mo ago
Interesting one.
3eb7988a1663 6mo ago
>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.
- 6mo ago

themafia 6mo ago

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.

RealityVoid 6mo ago

Meh, home distilled spirits are everywhere in Romania. I drank many many times home distilled spirits. They are not that dangerous.

ihalip 6mo ago
How's your eyesight?
- jimnotgym 6mo ago
  Looks like they didn't see your comment
- ane 6mo ago
  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.
- RealityVoid 6mo ago
  Not great, but I'm not blind.
- inglor_cz 6mo ago
  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.

retrac 6mo ago

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.

ghastmaster 6mo ago
>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.
- razakel 6mo ago
  >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".