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

theguardian.com

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

#301

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…

Methanol/CH3OH/MeOH is poisonous and its consumption causes a life-threatening health crisis that often results in death or permanent blindness. As little as 100 ml of methanol can kill or cause lifelong damage to one's health. One shouldn't have to restate these well-known facts but they have to be repeated at every opportunity because in many ways methanol too closely resembles ethanol/EtOH, it tastes the same and…

Methanol is dangerous. But you are simply misinformed about the risk of methanol showing up in your homebrew spirits. It's not your fault: this has been a propagandized issue. But methanol poisoning was only a thing during the prohibition because the feds started poisoning the fuel ethanol supply with it, and people either served it to people unwittingly, maliciously, or tried and failed to separate out the ethanol.

In real homebrew, you are not at risk of methanol poisoning. If you brew some beer (step 1 to making yourself whiskey), the alcohol makeup ends up being in a 1:1000 ratio of methanol to ethanol. Distilling does not create any more methanol, it merely concentrates it. Let's play out the worst possible scenario here, where you're targeting azeotropic ethanol, and specifically targeting methanol with your cuts. In order to end up with a 100ml of methanol, you would need to be running a batch of targeting 100L (26 gallons) of ethanol, which means starting with 2,000L (530 gallons) of beer. That is wildly outside the range of casual home distilling.

And keep in mind in order to hit that worst case scenario, the distiller needs to know enough to be making cuts, but not know to discard the first cut, which is done normally even without methanol concerns simply because it contains a bunch of really disgusting aromatics.

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a myth. It might be overblown (in the typical home batch sizes there probably isn't enough methanol to worry about anyway.) However methanol will start to boil out first and so the head will have measurable more methanol than latter - this is the basic physics of distillation. You won't get all the methanol out by discarding the head (again this is how distillation works), but you will get an elevated porti…

The myth is that a home distiller can unknowingly produce something that is poisonous due to methanol. Your statement about methanol being in the heads is also wrong, because the evaporative properties change when you have ethanol, methanol, and water all mixed together. It's not as simple as the naive "lower boiling point means it comes out first". Here's more info if you're interested https://fx5.com/dispelling-mis…

I concluded from that, distillation cannot be used to concentrate alcohol. I'm on chemist, but I know enough to know that your article fails the sniff test - it is taking some facts but it is misapplying them.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I don't like using seat belt laws as an example of preventing people from harming themselves.

The most important justification for seat belt laws is ensuring that drivers can maintain control when things get spicy and keep a minor event from escalating into a collision that will harm bystanders. And other innocent people in the same car who will be injured by the unbelted person being thrown around.

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

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that people used it after the fact for marketing an unrelated issue doesn’t have anything to do with the original intent of the statue. There was a lot of ret-conning American history in the late 19th to early 20th century as a result of mass immigration.

Things can come to mean something different from what their funders intend. It happens all the time, especially with art, language and especially public monuments. The Statue of Liberty’s connection to Ellis island is undeniable. The national museum of immigration is part of the same monument and run by the same staff. It’s not ret-conning to say that the Statue of Liberty is indelibly linked - physically and symboli…

The full title of the statue is “La Liberté éclairant le monde”—it’s impossible not to see it as a symbol of the ideals of the Enlightenment spreading across the world. That’s the common philosophical ground of both American and French Revolutions, and from there the source of the friendship that the statue represents.

At least some minimal notion of hospitality with respect to migration is part of that Enlightenment. (Kant’s Perpetual Peace is emphatic about this; Derrida annotates the relevant section with fresh eyes in Hospitality vol. 1, the first lecture and ff.)

That said, I also agree with you that symbols are not fully formed at birth and it is not the case that what they represent never changes at all in the course of their history.

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The myth is that a home distiller can unknowingly produce something that is poisonous due to methanol. Your statement about methanol being in the heads is also wrong, because the evaporative properties change when you have ethanol, methanol, and water all mixed together. It's not as simple as the naive "lower boiling point means it comes out first". Here's more info if you're interested https://fx5.com/dispelling-mis…

I concluded from that, distillation cannot be used to concentrate alcohol. I'm on chemist, but I know enough to know that your article fails the sniff test - it is taking some facts but it is misapplying them.

If that's the conclusion you drew from that article, you either didn't read large sections of it or failed to understand it. Not sure how to help you but to suggest you try again.

The principle is the same reason why when you distill at 180 degrees, you do not wind up with a distillate with zero water in it.

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

#306
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From https://etsc.eu/billionaires-eur-25000-drink-driving-fine-pu... > A Norwegian billionaire that recorded a BAC level three times higher than the legal limit has been banned from driving and handed a 250,000 krone fine (EUR 25,000). But the fine could have been much higher as, under Norwegian law, fines are linked to monthly income and in some cases overall wealth. > Finland has a ‘day fine’ system, with penalties…

I think it's pretty common in Europe, at least for minor offences. We have it in Switzerland, too. How it works here is that the fines are defined in "day rates" instead of monetary amount, and a day rate is half your daily income.

We don't have it in Romania.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Picking up a flower and smoking it on the spot is interstate commerce I don't quite follow - would you be able to explain the argument behind this for me?

(Not the poster you're replying to)

Pretty sure they were pointing out the absurdity of Gonzales v. Raich (545 U.S. 1)... But that really is the holding of the US Supreme Court in that case.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incorrect. The methanol bonds tighter to water and doesn't distill out clean in the heads.

Some does. You don't need perfection of distilation to make a difference.

More is in the tails, neither is enough to be of concern.

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity "Methanol poisoning can be treated with fomepizole or ethanol.[19][22][23] Both drugs act to reduce the action of alcohol dehydrogenase on methanol by means of competitive inhibition. Ethanol, the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages, acts as a competitive inhibitor by more effectively binding and saturating the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme in the liver, thus blocki…

Alcohol is not an antidote! It only competes with enzyme binding to slow the production of fomic acid. Fomepizole costs thousands of dollars and is often unstocked for that reason in many countries, although I guess it will become stocked in the US now. Dialysis machines are also in short supply. One mass poisoning event would overwhelm available dialysis resources in a state. >>Bootleg brewers also sometimes add eno…

I didn't say antidote, I did say its used in treatment.

How do you imagine a mass poisoning event is going to occur? Is it something like a mass ecoli or salmonella event?

>No, someone in the supply chain making cash. Someone swapped in some 20% methanol and hoped it would go unnoticed.

How does that have anything to do with home made and unsold products?

You're raising a valid issue with any tainted consumable, not something specific to home distillation.

>Also let's not ignore the toxic copper and lead in the moonshine. It is a persistent problem.

You can, if you do what's common and build out of stainless steel. And again we're talking home consumption.

Why are you the police of what I poison myself with?

>Obviously you are going to hold tight to your beliefs. Please spread them somewhere else

I'm sticking with the data, you are angry and wrong. Your ignorance at this point is willful. GLWT.

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

#310
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity "Methanol poisoning can be treated with fomepizole or ethanol.[19][22][23] Both drugs act to reduce the action of alcohol dehydrogenase on methanol by means of competitive inhibition. Ethanol, the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages, acts as a competitive inhibitor by more effectively binding and saturating the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme in the liver, thus blocki…

From how I'm reading this, you're disagreeing with the parent but your quotes actually support what they wrote? Ethanol is not an antidote or "cure", it's more or less an attempt at dilution. There are other posts in this thread explaining why it's dangerous to believe that methanol poisoning can simply be counteracted with ethanol. >Bootleg brewers also sometimes add enough methanol to informally produced spirits to…

There isn't enough methanol procured during distillation to cause I'll effects. So home made spirits are safe.

So if someone gets methanol poisoning from shine, it's because it was added by someone intentionally.

So don't buy bootleg spirits.

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