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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

#231

Post by giantg2 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #219
giantg2 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made it sound as if they were poisoning alcohol intended for drinking (looks like it was possibly edited or I missed that it said industrial). Methanol and other additives are still added to most industrial alcohol today.

"Methanol and other additives are still added to most industrial alcohol today." Depends in which country you reside. Where I am the denaturants methanol and pyridine were removed decades ago and replaced with the nontoxic bitterant denatonium.

Yeah, the context was in the US.

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

#232

Post by dualvariable »

_heimdall wrote: post #179
SapporoChris wrote: post #122

Earlier 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…

> There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.

Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporations take defensive actions against that, and you wind up with "do not take Flumitrol if you are allergic to Flumitrol" kinds of warnings everywhere. It is "individualistic" in the most narrowly narcissistic sense, which I don't think is what the founders envisioned either.

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

#233

Post by reisse »

Spooky23 wrote: post #189
reisse wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One leads to the other. Once you have distillation everywhere, bootlegging follows. This was literally the basis of one of the first conflicts of the early federal government.

I'm not talking about homebrew bootlegging here. It's large-scale frauds where industrial ethanol (which often contains poisonous amounts of methanol, or _is_ methanol) is mixed with flavorants and colorants to cheaply imitate various hard drinks.

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

#234

Post by avidiax »

leni536 wrote: post #113
avidiax wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

> above that boiling point you distilled out all methanol (with a mix of ethanol)

That's not what studies have shown. Methanol boils off in all phases of distillation, and remains in high concentration at least halfway through.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.3c00627

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.1c00025

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

#235

Post by ninalanyon »

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.

Most other hobbies are only significantly dangerous to the practitioner.

Distilling on the other hand can easily harm, or even kill, friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances.

Brewing is very unlikely to do anyone any harm other than by overconsumption of alcohol.

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

#236

Post by ninalanyon »

martin-t wrote: post #151
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #146

> … 1868 … $10,000 fine. If the original 1868 law stated $10,000, that’s insane (equivalent of millions , these days). If not, then that might mean this law has been regularly reviewed and updated, so it’s not just something that was lost in the back of the cabinet.

If laws were written by engineers, all sums of money would be expressed relative to median income. And at that point it wouldn't be a stretch for most people to make the connection that some people are more privileged than others and fines should be relative to personal wealth and income. Imagine if laws were written by people who know what a function is...

Why median income? Why not the income of the individuals concerned. Any fixed value fine simply means that the wealthy can just treat it as a cost.

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

#237

Post by martin-t »

mikewarot wrote: post #201
martin-t wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If laws were written by engineers, all sums of money would be expressed relative to median income. And at that point it wouldn't be a stretch for most people to make the connection that some people are more privileged than others and fines should be relative to personal wealth and income. Imagine if laws were written by people who know what a function is...

>If laws were written by engineers, all sums of money would be expressed relative to median income. If laws were written by engineers, money would hold its value, and the laws wouldn't require constant adjustment.

Well, inflation is a trick how to steal from people without actually reaching into their wallets. In that regard, it's genius.

Imagine the alternative that once in a while the government says it needs more money and just subtracts it from your bank account. There'd be riots.

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

#238

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

martin-t wrote: post #237
mikewarot wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If laws were written by engineers, all sums of money would be expressed relative to median income. If laws were written by engineers, money would hold its value, and the laws wouldn't require constant adjustment.

Well, inflation is a trick how to steal from people without actually reaching into their wallets. In that regard, it's genius. Imagine the alternative that once in a while the government says it needs more money and just subtracts it from your bank account. There'd be riots.

> There'd be riots

Like in France?

I think that was over gas prices.

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

#239

Post by martin-t »

ninalanyon wrote: post #236
martin-t wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If laws were written by engineers, all sums of money would be expressed relative to median income. And at that point it wouldn't be a stretch for most people to make the connection that some people are more privileged than others and fines should be relative to personal wealth and income. Imagine if laws were written by people who know what a function is...

Why median income? Why not the income of the individuals concerned. Any fixed value fine simply means that the wealthy can just treat it as a cost.

That's what I meant in the second sentence.

It's not just about fines, many countries have support for families with children. I don't think the rich should get more money per child. For fines, it absolutely makes sense.

A harsher alternative is to stop using fines altogether and instead give "prison micro-sentences" - a few hours or days in prison. It makes perfect sense - when you pay a fine, you lost a bit of your life by working and not having anything to show for it at the end. So why not make it direct and just take a bit of time directly from the person. It nicely sidesteps various tricks how the rich hide their assets, too.

Of course, the administrative overhead would be much larger, but then the offenders could take some part in maintaining the prison. Nothing would be more humbling to a privileged person than cleaning the prison toilet.

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

#240

Post by mattmaroon »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #43
nik282000 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I thought if you held the outlet of the still at 79c until you stopped getting distillate then you could be reasonably sure that you took out most of the the majority of the methanol.

You can. I think parent is using some technicality of how distillation is not going to get you to 100.0000% purity.

No, I’m not. I’m pointing out that distillation doesn’t work how you were told it does in middle school which is the reflexive argument people are making. The argument that all the methanol comes out early because it has a lower boiling point is simply incorrect. Mass spectromery proves it.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.3c00627

When you get into distilling you learn pretty fast that a lot of what you’ve been told about it is fake due to both deliberate propaganda, and the fact that a lot of it was learned before we had scientific tools to investigate deeper.

You would pretty much have to try to poison yourself distilling and yet everybody thinks it’s a real risk.

Being poisoned by a bootlegger who adds methanol because it’s cheaper (much like fentanyl in opiods) is not a fake risk, and a lot of people who think the first thing happened actually had the second thing happen.

And I’m certainly not criticizing people for this, I went to school for physics and yet was on the other side of this debate when I started distilling before I did research.

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