A late, former coworker died a couple of years ago. I think he was 62 or 63. He was taken to the ER and was found to have low blood pressure. He was admitted, and died of a heart attack a couple/few days later. He had been experimenting with distilling his own whiskey at home for the previous several months (maybe a year).
Can improperly distilled whiskey cause low blood pressure and cardiac arrest?
It is supposed to make you go blind, not give you a heart attack:
The initial symptoms of methanol intoxication include central nervous system depression, headache, dizziness, nausea, lack of coordination, and confusion. Sufficiently large doses cause unconsciousness and death. The initial symptoms of methanol exposure are usually less severe than the symptoms from the ingestion of a similar quantity of ethanol. Once the initial symptoms have passed, a second set of symptoms arises, from 10 to as many as 30 hours after the initial exposure, that may include blurring, photophobia, snowstorm vision or complete loss of vision, acidosis, and putaminal hemorrhages, an uncommon but serious complication. These symptoms result from the accumulation of toxic levels of formate in the blood, and may progress to death by respiratory failure. Physical examination may show tachypnea, and eye examination may show dilated pupils with hyperemia of the optic disc and retinal edema.
Did they discover any symptoms like that?
Not that I am.an expert in the field of home distilling, but the waste product methanol can easily end up in the bottle, if the distillation is not correctly performed, and amongst other symptoms of methanol poisoning are low blood pressure and potential heart attack.
It is more infamous for causing blindness, though.
are you questioning the destilling process (fumes,…) or the consumption of the destilate afterwards …
those are 2 different worlds
Consumption.
He’d been drinking his own product for months. Maybe the last batch was contaminated.
There’s a thing about the first and last bit of distilling, particularly the last bit (“tails”) can contain unwanted heavier alcohols and other intresting compounds that can be poisonous. If your coworker was too eager to sample his wares and drank something too soon or kept too much of the output, that could be the result.
Key Aspects of Distilling Tails:
Composition: Tails (also called feints) consist of compounds like butanol, acetic acid, and furfural, with a lower alcohol by volume (ABV) than the hearts.
Identifying Tails: Tails usually start appearing when the alcohol percentage falls below about 80% (depending on the run), and the output feels oily or tastes weak and bitter.
The methanol will boil off first in distilling, so the “head” can also be dangerous. IIRC, this was suggested as the cause of methanol poisoning from home-brew in South Africa a while ago…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/south-africa-mystery-deaths-1.6524897