Could home (whiskey) distilling cause low blood pressure and a heart attack?

[TroutMan]

And copying a couple of my posts from the other thread:

@TroutMan

@griffin1977

I get that modern mass poisoning from liquor (e.g. the recent one in cambodia) is clearly from people adulterating booze with industrial alcohol, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to get dangerous quantities of methanol if you screw up distilling badly.

Yes, it does mean that. It is not possible to get dangerous quantities of methanol if you screw up distilling. There is simply not enough methanol created, and any way in which you screw up distillation will still result in a lethal dose of ethanol before you get to a lethal dose of methanol.

If you have an extremely high-performance fractionating column still, you could possibly isolate enough methanol away from ethanol and water. But this is completely out of reach of most liquor manufacturers, let alone a home distiller, and it would require exceptional skill and exceptional equipment. It would not be the result of a screw up.

@griffin1977

I was taught (by people with a lot of professional chemical knowledge and less professional distillation knowledge) that there is a small amount of methanol naturally in the booze being distilled. So as methanol and ethanol have different boiling points you can screw up and end up with dangerous quantities of methanol in the liquor.

I’m a chemist by education, and I’ve played around with stove-top liquor distillation for several years. And I was originally under the impression that methanol came out in the heads, despite all that. It’s a very common error based on thinking only in terms of boiling points. But as noted in the reddit thread, the solubility of methanol plays a bigger role than the boiling point. From here:

Methanol has a boiling point (64.7 °C) that is considerably lower than the ones of ethanol (78.5 °C) and water (100 °C). However, it is nevertheless difficult to separate methanol from the azeotropic ethanol-water mixture. When the alcohol mixture is distilled in simple pot stills such as the ones used by most small-scale artisanal distilleries throughout Central Europe, the solubility of methanol in water is the major factor rather than its boiling point. As methanol is highly soluble in water, it will distil over more at the end of distillations when vapours are richer in water. That means, methanol will appear in almost equal concentration in almost all fractions of pot still distillation in reference to ethanol (i.e., as g/hL pa), until the very end where it accumulates in the so-called tailings fraction. However, even today many professional distillers believe that methanol concentrates preferably in the first fractions (heads fractions). And that methanol is the reason that heads fractions smell and taste bad (which is caused by acetaldehyde and ethyl acetate but not by methanol).

Note than “accumulating in the tailings” means the ratio of methanol to ethanol is increased by only ~20%. Even if you drink only the tailings, it is still a very small amount of methanol.

@TroutMan

An azeotrope like ethanol/water is different from what happens with methanol, which is based on relative solubility.

Ethanol (CH₃-CH₂-OH) has an extra ethylene group compared to methanol (CH₃-OH), making it slightly more repellent to water (the OH at the end of an alcohol is hydrophilic, the CH_x groups are hydrophobic). So as the temperature increases, the water “holds on” to the methanol more than the ethanol.