Have a cite for that (that’s not reddit) ? Genuine question. I’ve heard people say this. But 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 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.
You can follow the cite in the reddit post if you want to get deep in the science. The reddit post quotes the pertinent parts.
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.
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.
I guess I would have to think about it, since there’s not a methanol/water azeotrope and as far as I know there’s not a methanol/ethanol/water ternary azeotrope. So I guess it seems counterintuitive but if that’s what it does that’s what it does.
Yeah, it’s not intuitive. 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 CHx groups are hydrophobic). So as the temperature increases, the water “holds on” to the methanol more than the ethanol.
Nipick here. It doesn’t. Whether what you say about methanol is right or not. No one is home distilling liquor and then passing it off as store brought booze at nightclubs where it poisons people. That has no bearing on whether or not home distilling is safe.
Cite? There was plenty of home distilled moonshine during prohibition obviously but I’ve never heard of it being passed off as branded liquor. AFAIK almost all the poisonings were just like that recent case in Cambodia where poisonous industrial alcohol was added to liquor by the smugglers* as it was cheap and easily available (and wouldn’t kill all your customers if you didn’t add too much, just like Fentanyl in drugs nowadays)
I didn’t say it was passed off as branded liquor (although i suspect it sometimes was), i said it was sold in nightclubs. Nightclubs were still selling booze, and they had to get it somewhere.
Wow, I never would have guessed that my friend who has been making an incredible rye for the last 10 years was using a car radiator and not cleaning the animal carcasses and insect nests out of his home distilling equipment.
Yeah, i think cheap bootleg hooch is a lot more dangerous than hobbyist distilled liquors for any number of reasons.
When i worked in a lab, i used both ethanol and methanol as solvents. (And i used gallons of ethanol as cleaning solution. I still can’t drink vodka, because it smells like a cleaner to me, not like a beverage.) They don’t smell the same. The methanol actually smelled nicer to me. I suspect that a trained distiller can tell whether a batch has too much methanol by the taste and smell of the product, but not because it tastes “harsh” or “bad”, just because it’s different.
The big lab in the village I grew up in also had alcohol stores like that. Back in the day they break into it during staff parties, until inevitably someone took the wrong kind and was blinded permanently.
This wasn’t a cautionary urban legend to stop kids from raiding the alcohol store, the poor guy is still alive and still totally blind
The real issue with safety is preventing half-assed bootleg manufacturing for illicit sale, not preventing Joe & Jane Whiskeyhound from brewing their own booze for their own or their friend’s small scale consumption.
The practical law enforcement challenge is allowing the latter while aggressively preventing the former. As with illicit drugs, the profit margins of fake booze are so huge as to be irresistible. So it will find its way into the sorta mainstream supply.
Which is a distinct issue from the US constitutional issues.
I was under age at the time, so i wasn’t invited to the parties. But i think they did break into the ethanol. And there’s no way anyone would confuse the two. The bottles were very different, and the ethanol came with the paper sticker indicating the federal alcohol tax has been paid, because it was, in fact, drinking-quality 95% ethanol.
I mean, i believe that someone somewhere might have drunk the methanol in some lab, but it would have been just as easy to drink the acids or the other reagents that came in the “reagent bottles”. It was in no way inevitable. I know people who have worked in many labs that filched some of the lab ethanol, and they are all fine. (And filching some from my lab would have been easy. I literally poured it down the drain every day to rinse glassware. No one was tracking it at all precisely.)
I would suggest that relaxing regulations around this and allowing a free-for-all, do whatever you want making alcohol, probably will not have good outcomes.
