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I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.
Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free
FYI you can also grow psychedelic mushrooms at home in all 50 states legally. The precursors are legal
Do be careful. Depending on the state mushrooms become illegal at different stages of production.
I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.
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.
The article is devoid of any meaningful legal language. It is important to note that this ruling applies only to the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi as the fifth circuit is the court that decided this. That said, when parties bring cases to other federal circuit courts, they may cite this case. Frequently, circuit decisions can impact other district courts decisions.
Here are the official docs for the case
McNutt v. US Department of Justice
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca5.220...
I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.
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
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.
I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.
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 federa…
In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally. Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
Anything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe. I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.
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 all.
The foreshots you throw out do have things that taste bad and which you would not want to drink much of, but even if you mixed it all back in and got drunk, it would be the same amount of all of those chemicals you’d get if you just drank the mash, which is itself basically just beer or wine.
We distillers are a lot more likely to burn our house down than any other form of injury.
In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally. Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally. Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.