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
I’m not seeing where consuming the heads of a distillate (as you suggest) was the cause of this methanol poisoning. I’d actually suspect intentional adulteration considering how many and how quickly the victims seemed to succumb.
Frequent stories of people going blind (or going dead) from home-brew suggests this is not an isolated problem. I assume the illicit distiller either knows better but doesn’t care, or someone salvages the dregs, etc. …or there’s a discount market for cut-rate foul-tasting heads and tails.
There are four stages in distilling, the foreshot, head, heart, and tail. Heart is as you might guess the most desirable part.
It’s the foreshot that can contain methanol so if that was what did him in, it was due to very sloppy distilling.
Not just the heads and tails. The main part of distillate still contains reasonably nasty components. Which is why it is aged. Or filtered through a charcoal bed. Barrels used for aging usually have some amount of char on the inside which aids the process.
One wants to be very clear about what killed him. Low blood pressure isn’t good, but isn’t usually going to kill you by itself. There is a big gap between a heart attack aka MCI (myocardial infarction), various forms of heart failure, or say sudden cardiac death. Cardiac arrest just means the heart stops. It doesn’t tell you why. A bullet in the head will stop your heart.
Unless you knew a lot more about your colleague’s history there is nothing useful to guess at. Admission with low blood pressure might be because he was already on significant medication for high blood pressure associated with a whole range of conditions, and management of the condition got out of control. Perhaps as a prelude to ultimate failure.
He presented for admission for a reason. People don’t usually know they have low blood pressure unless they are already monitoring it for a reason. So maybe there was some other acute symptom, and low BP was just one finding upon admission.
Organ damage, especially to the kidneys, from imbibing lots of long chain and cyclic nasty components in the brew will get you a trip to hospital. But one would expect symptoms to manifest themselves long before heart damage became life threatening. Such damage is usually associated with chronically high blood pressure.
I know. It just seemed coincidental that he died ‘young-ish and healthy’ after he got into home-distilling. He presented with symptoms to the ER, and that’s where they found his blood pressure was low.
Anyway, I was just wondering if there was a possible connection between the low BP and heart attack, and his recent hobby.
One thing I read was that moonshiners will also put the head back into a later mix for further distilling to recover as much of the alcohol as possible.
I wonder too how the distilling was accomplished? Is there a risk of CO poisoning contributing to his condition if he’s using something like an open flame in a closed room? I assume nowadays home distilling uses electric heat - much simpler.
Done right, single stage distillation of a fairly good mash will reduce methanol by about 20%. If there is too much methanol to start out with, it doesn’t take “very sloppy distilling”.
Oof. There is a LOT of misinformation in this thread. In fact, most of what has been posted here is wrong. Somewhat coincidentally, the same topic is currently ongoing in the “home distilling ban ruled unconstitutional” thread in P&E.
To clarify:
I strongly encourage everyone to read this reddit post about distillation myths. It is well-sourced and not the opinion of some random redditor.
And copying a couple of my posts from the other thread:
During the 18th century Gin Craze in Britain, most of the associated health problems, people going blind or getting sick, was associated with product adulterated with turpentine or other toxic substances rather than faulty distillation. You didn’t need a license to make gin at the time and there was an incentive to make it as cheaply as possible, so in the turpentine went.
Yup. The myth was really cemented in the US during Prohibition, where a lot of people did die because of adulterated liquor. The government had a vested interest in confusing people about the cause in order to scare people away from booze completely, so they would purposely describe it as homemade or home-distilled liquor, without mentioning that it was spiked with methanol, wood alcohol, or whatever.
So what about the other non-ethanol products that come out of distilling? How do they figure in?
And as one item I read said the head and tail are sometimes poured into the next batch to try to recover some of the included ethanol, what is the possibility of creating a greater concentrate of undesirable chemicals?
The other byproducts of fermentation are generally easier to separate (and they have a stronger taste and odor so you know they are present). And again, they are present in tiny amounts, way below any level that causes issues.
Adding the heads back to the next batch doesn’t concentrate it enough to cause problems. There is still way more ethanol in the heads than the other contaminants.
If you are a bootlegger when alcohol is illegal, you have a motive to collect as much alcohol as possible. If you are a home distiller hobbyist, you are probably aiming to make tasty booze, not the most possible booze.
I doubt many hobbyists keep the undesirable parts of the distillate.
I suppose he might have given himself CO poisoning with a bad set up to heat his product, but i seriously doubt that drinking home brew was the problem. 62 is old enough for some random aging things to take a person out.