Earlier quoted context omitted.
The statue of liberty poem was never a legally binding immigration policy. Not to detract from your point, which I agree with.
It was marketing that was installed on the statute of liberty in 1903, when the U.S. was already fully developed. It doesn’t reflect the original intent at all.
US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
221–230 of 337 posts
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#222As 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…
Well, I live in a country with both huge distillation culture and significantly non-zero number of methanol poisonings, and they never happen from home brewing. It's really hard to homebrew/distill methanol in a quantity enough to poison you in an otherwise ethanol solution (which acts as an antidote). It's so rare this thread is literally the first time I've heard about possibility of methanol poisoning from homebre…
Unfortunately, that has happened enough times with people dying for it to be a problem. Seems some societies are more susceptible to these extremely dangerous ripoffs than others.
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who's involved in said home production, the only way someone is getting methanol poisoning is if it's intentional done.
negligence (especially via ignorance) is a thing. a hobbyist wanting to celebrate their first batch with their buddies can poison them with some smeared hearts. but i get what you’re saying.
First, if they are not using anything with pectin in it, there isn't a significant amount of methanol at all worth measuring.
Second, if they did use fruit skins in the fermentation stage, there still isn't enough methanol to compete with the ethanol, (which is the cure to methanol poisoning) with out intentionally poisoning the batch.
You shouldn't push such FUD.
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#224As 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…
For example, when I worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I was surprised to discover that the percentage of imported food/beverage actually tested for safety is very low. Like comically, microscopically, unbelievably low.
In the United States, I suspect concerns over reputation and civil litigation do more to keep our food safe than government testing.
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
negligence (especially via ignorance) is a thing. a hobbyist wanting to celebrate their first batch with their buddies can poison them with some smeared hearts. but i get what you’re saying.
No, they really can't. First, if they are not using anything with pectin in it, there isn't a significant amount of methanol at all worth measuring. Second, if they did use fruit skins in the fermentation stage, there still isn't enough methanol to compete with the ethanol, (which is the cure to methanol poisoning) with out intentionally poisoning the batch. You shouldn't push such FUD.
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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 t…
They're not technically complex, but you need space and time for them, and producing a beer you would actually want to drink and bottling it isn't trivial.
I know one guy who moonshines for family-and-friends consumption, not sale, and I'll pass. It's not that much cheaper than just buying it (note: my state alcohol taxes are not that high) and it's a lot more work. I might make a batch of wine -> brandy from fruits that grew on a tree in my back yard if I had plums, just to say I did, but I'm not interested in making a big batch of corn liquor.
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
I forget the exact wording, but the seat belt law are a good example of it. Laws are passed to protect the populace from self harm so that society doesn't suffer from it. It probably doesn't apply here because home distillation is very niche. However, if a bunch of people show up in emergency rooms and it drives up health care costs then expect a quick reversal in policy.
There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist. Its a chicken and egg problem as well, the way we regulate and manage health care and health insurance (at least in the US) allows for costs to pretty easily bleed out to the rest of society. That implies that we must then be collectivist in other policies, though that is counter to many of the origi…
Like many of these sorts of choices, its false to think of it as binary because its about choosing a place on the continuum between them.
On the methanal risk issue, one possible compromise would to have places which can run free checks on booze for methanal. Not too different from the practice in France where you can bring in mushrooms you've collected to the pharmacist who can tell you which ones are delicious and which are death incarnate. But of course this would have to be a publicly funded service which america seems to loathe ("I'd rather go blind than have a single tax dollar go to free booze testing!")
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
you suggest additional drinking methanol when you're "normally" drunk?? that's dangerously counterfactual.
No, ethanol is an antidote to methanol
Ethanol can be used as a temporary measure in methanol poisoning as it temporarily outcompetes methanol in the metabolic process. So it's only useful until proper medical help arrives when better alternatives such as fomepizole are administered. Even then there is no guarantee of success.
Methanol is still metabolized to dangerous formaldehyde and formic acid by the liver's alcohol dehydrogenase. The logic of giving ethanol or fomepizole is to slow down the rate of production methanol's dangerous metabolic byproducts so less damage is done, nevertheless those dangerous metabolites are still produced.
Ethanol's first-pass metabolite is acetaldehyde and it is still toxic but not to the same degree as those of methanol.
It is incorrect to say ethanol is an antidote for methanol poisoning. Using ethanol is a last-ditch stand to try and take some minor control of an otherwise out of control situation. There's nothing subtle about it—it's a blunderbuss approach that often doesn't work well because replacing one poison with a less toxic one is a pretty hit-and-miss process.
Antidotes counteract poisons, that's not what happens when you give ethanol in methanol poisonings.
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#229Great. Now make it legal to grow ANY type of flower.
That (CSA) falls under regulating interstate commerce instead of tax powers. Picking up a flower and smoking it on the spot is interstate commerce thus i dont think this same idea applies.
I don't quite follow - would you be able to explain the argument behind this for me?
Re: US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that the vapor of the mash is always a mix of the components, and even above the boiling point of methanol, it still produces a mixed vapor. At room temperature, all of the components produce some vapor and will evaporate. This continues as the temperature rises. It's not clear to me that simple distillation of a methanol/ethanol mixture can produce either pure ethanol or pure methanol at any point, just as…
You can't distill out pure methanol, as at the boiling point of methanol ethanol also has some vapor pressure, so you distill a mix. However above that boiling point you distilled out all methanol (with a mix of ethanol), and the remaining ethanol should be free from methanol. This also matches what happens when distilling ethanol from water. You can't distill pure ethanol, but you csn distill ethanol-free water afte…
Right, normal commercial ethanol production is 95% EtOH, 5% H2O (the constant boiling mixture/azeotrope). That's good enough for most uses but not all. The only problem the average person would ever likely encounter from the residual H2O would be in the application of alcohol-based coatings such as shellac where it can cause whitish discoloration. Painters will occasionally use 99% EtOH which is substantially more expensive (removing that residual H2O requires an altogether different proxess).