Devin Watkins, a lawyer for the Texas-based hobby group at the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Reuters that the ruling “respects the rights of our clients to live under a government of limited powers.”
The hobby group, which represented the plaintiffs, and four of its 1,300 members filed a lawsuit in December against the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau and the Department of Justice, saying that the government’s regulatory reach could not extend to activities within a person’s home.
I guess Daisy May Moses would be happy the Infernal Revenue Service has been reined in.
Oh geez, can we stop already with the myth that home distilling causes methanol poisoning? Adding methanol to hooch causes methanol poisoning, not distillation.
The only poisoning that could be happening is alcohol poisoning, and alcohol is already readily available.
According to the article, the hobby group made that claim. The article states “U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, in his ruling on Wednesday, sided with the Hobby Distillers Association’s lawyers that the 156-year-old ban exceeded Congress’s taxing power and violated the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause.”
I regularly forage for mushrooms. I only eat what I know to be safe, after positive ID. I’ve belonged to a mushroom club, own a few books, know how to do a spore print, etc. I’d never eat a shroom I wasn’t sure about, or one that has toxic look-alikes.
That said, there are people who eat mushrooms they found and end up sick or dead. I do not think making mushroom foraging illegal is the right approach to this situation.
No, this just doesn’t happen. All the poisonings in your linked article are from methanol added to denature the alcohol (and bad distillers failing to remove it), or evil people adding methanol to make drinkers think it’s ethanol.
Yes, pectin can form methanol. But to concentrate enough to poison someone, it would take a very skillful distiller to purposely isolate the methanol. Simply leaving in the heads is not enough - the ethanol will kill you before you get a lethal dose of methanol.
I agree with you on that. There’s no sense in requiring everybody to have a 20C licensed kitchen (that may be a NY term) just to make dinner. I’m not opposed to home distilling any more than I am to home canning, which can also be dangerous if it’s not done right and which it would be absurd for a state to try to ban. I just don’t think the specific argument they seemed to be making makes sense.
And, according to @x-ray_vision’s quote, neither did the judge, who apparently decided on other grounds entirely. Whether those other grounds make sense I don’t know.
Well, like gnoitall said, alcohol was already legal. And I assume this just puts distilling on the same footing as home brewing; all it does is recognize people’s right to distill liquor for personal use, not to start up a commercial moonshine factory in their kitchen.
Good. Even freeze jacking is technically illegal which is stupid. At what point does “accidentally” leaving it outside in winter become a crime?
Reddit’s r/firewater long-standing post on methanol safety. A lot of anti-distilling info is Prohibition propaganda, also a time when alcohol was intentionally adulterated. Some minor concern due to bad processes, but nothing that suggests it’s a good idea to regulate private use.
Yes, this is 5th circuit, seems to primarily affect the plaintiff’s members right now, and possibly people living within the 5th. This is primarily a taxation decision so it does not mean that some regulation can be imposed, just not the current justification. But ultimately it should all drop away.
The merits or dismerits of home distillation wasn’t the issue. The issue was whether the federal government, which is supposedly a government of limited constitutionally enumerated powers, had a valid authority over the practice.
Thanks for sharing that post. It reaffirms what I knew from my days in the brewing/distilling community, which is to say that even a catastrophically fucked up distillation is not going to make a dangerous, methanol-spiked liquor. It’s well documented that the historical tales of prohibition-era methanol blindness come from products juiced up with denatured alcohol or worse. Yet we still see statements like the one quoted below:
The real danger in home distilling is setting a bunch of shit on fire. But it’s still less dangerous than deep-frying a turkey, based on a non-scientific review of funny YouTube videos.
To quote the key statement in the reddit post:
Other than the obvious ethanol overdose, all poisonous alcohol that has ever been consumed, has been adulterated, or was in some other way contaminated. It was not the fault of poor distillation procedures. How** you run your still will not affect how safe your product is.** It might affect how good the end result is, but that’s where it stops.
Maybe if during Prohibition the demand for cheap alcohol was so great that even the foreshots could find a buyer, doubtless some pretty bad stuff got around.