US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

Post by general1465 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 12:49 PM UTC

dmantis wrote: post #116

angry_octet wrote: post #86

As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe. However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitut…

There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence and that's totally normal, that's what freedom is. As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.

Post by mattmaroon » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

akersten wrote: post #40

mattmaroon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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.…

Post by cubefox » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 12:54 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #124

cubefox wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe. Another way to increase safety is to reduce the availability of illegal stills without quality control by enforcing the ban. (Anyone who thinks otherwise presumably also thinks all hard drugs should be legalized since this presumably wouldn't lead to an increase in consumption.)

> (Anyone who thinks otherwise presumably also thinks all hard drugs should be legalized since this presumably wouldn't lead to an increase in consumption.) Why should the government be in the business of reducing consumption? Do you believe alcohol to be immoral, and the government's role to be enforcing morality?

Post by theodric » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

ciupicri wrote: post #158

theodric wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common knowledge about methanol being a huge risk is wildly overstated in reality, and likely continues in part because it benefits the government for people to believe strongly in the danger and continue to purchase taxed liquor. Distillation does not create new chemicals: there is methanol in your bottle of wine, and distilling that wine into brandy does not change the ratio, it only removes (primarily) water.…

Though it's harder to drink the same amount of methanol if you have to drink lots of water too, i.e. the wine has not been distilled.

Post by mattmaroon » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #33

mattmaroon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

>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.