I’d like to discuss two matters. The first pertains to the recent ruling and whether the current laws on the books are constitutional. I’m not legally savvy enough to weigh in, but that won’t stop others.
The second is whether and how various levels of government ought to regulate home distilling. While I can’t speak to the soundness of the ruling, I like the outcome, as I have long felt home distilling should be legal and subject only to minimal safety regulation.
The biggest risk is around inflammable liquids and vapors, requiring proper ventilation and care around ignition sources. State and local fire codes may apply.
I’m sure someone will bring up methanol. The cases of methanol poisoning we read about are from deliberate adulteration. Methanol does naturally occur, especially in high-pectin mashes (e.g., from fruit). But let’s please dispel the dangerous myth spread by non-chemists that methanol is concentrated in the heads/foreshots. Distillation does not separate by boiling point. Ternary azeotropes are complicated. And methanol, if present in the mash, will be found in all fractions and can even be concentrated in the hearts or tails depending on the overall mix. The early fractions are removed due to the presence of other compounds that taste bad.
I used to distill my white wines if I wasn’t happy with the way they came out. It has been close to 40 years since I did a batch. The one thing that used to make me laugh was when people talked about recipes. It all tasted about the same to me. Distilled alcohol. Outside of throwing the heads away I never worried about it. Of course I never drank large quantities of it either. I used most of it for camp stoves.
Where I live, a 1.75L handle of the cheapest vodka starts at around $11. I don’t know if it would make financial sense to distill one’s own alcohol with vodka prices being that cheap.
I have no idea how much it would cost to make at home ethanol. Also I don’t know how to do it safely anyway.
I know a gallon of 85% ethanol at the gas station is only about $3, so I would assume on an industrial scale thats about how much it costs w/o all the alcohol taxes. But to me at least, the small amount of savings doesn’t justify the potential dangers of having highly flammable liquids being made in your home with potential methanol in it.
Taxation on spirits was a big source of revenue for the goverment, so laws restricting the distillation of alcohol in homes was mostly about protecting an important source of revenue. In 1868, the movement to prohibit alcohol in the United States was in full swing, and at times the drys were in the habit of exaggerating the dangers of John Barleycorn. Though in the interest of fairness, alcohol consumption was and continues to be a problem.
Practically speaking, I’m not sure how they can. They can regulate how a building is constructed, but if I put a still in my guest bathroom and start pumping out gin, how’s the city going to know? They can continue to regulate the sale of alcohol. Bootlegging is still a thing, and I imagine this decision could lead to more.
and taxing spirits–and resisting them–has a long history. Back in 1794, farmers from Western Pennsylvania rose up in protest of what they saw as unfair taxation . In 1791, Congress approved a new, federal tax on spirits and the stills that produced them
Ethanol is trading on the market for about $1.90/gal. You’ll get just over 2 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn. At today’s prices. the corn alone will cost $1.88 per gallon of ethanol. OTOH. the leftover corn makes for a nutritious livestock feed, so if you have cattle or hogs it need not go to waste.
As for the legal issues, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution (which repealed Prohibition) leaves that pretty much up to the states.
My university textbooks certainly spread the dangerous myth that distillation separates by boiling point.. For anyone reading this later, I think the point Ruekn is trying to make is that single-stage distillation is not effective in complete separation, which is why distilled liquor still contains some water, and that the ethanol and methanol fractions are close. And is also a reason why expensive vodka is more expensive than cheap vodka.
And yes, Methanol is more volatile than Ethanol, and as a direct result, the gaseous phase of an evaporating mixture contains a higher proportion of methanol than the liquid phase. And as a result, the liquid phase contains a decreasing proportion of methanol as the distillation proceeds.(Unitl it reaches an equilibrium, as described by the phase diagram). And as a result of that, t he gas phase contains a decreasing proportion of methanol as the distillation proceeds. Which is to say: the head shots have more methanol.
Probably a good thing. I suggest that when you aren’t happy with the way the wine turns out, it may have high methanol levels, which will be retained in single-stage distilation, and particularly in the head shots.
I always bought my juice from a grower in Temecula, CA. I would select the blend I wanted, and they would come over and pump it into my barrels from a truck. One question I have, if I took one sip from the white wine, I would have a terrible sore throat the next day. My wife loved it, and it didn’t bother her at all. It was a fairly dry wine at about 10%. My temperatures here were a little too high for the white wines, where the red wines did fine.
The safety card suggests that Methanol is more irritating than Ethanol (direct skin irritation), but honestly, I’ve never heard of anybody getting a sore throat before they go blind, so it’s probably something else.
DDG, distillers dried grain, is used as a high-protein feed since the starches were removed in the fermentation stage. I monitor the Flagstaff station on the Southern Transcon with easy access to the Midwest. Every day several trainloads of grain (corn) go one way, and trainloads of DDG and tanks of ethanol go the other.
It’s a hobbyist thing, not an economy thing. In fact, I’d bet there’s a lot of overlap with homebrewing in that sense.
As far as methanol and other stuff goes, you don’t have more than your original wash started with (it’s a fermentation product, not a distilling product) but you can concentrate it, if you distill it wrong. The good news is that it comes out of the still at a different time/temp as the stuff you want to keep, so as long as you don’t keep your heads and tails, you’ll probably be fine.
Either your university textbooks contained different content that you misremember or they oversimplified what they were teaching to teenagers, as is the custom. Raoult’s law applies to ideal solutions, i.e., not what we’re dealing with. Armchair scientific just-so stories get people killed because it’s a short hop from “the head shots have more methanol” to “this reduces methanol elsewhere”. If what you wrote were true, it would be nigh on impossible for isobutanol (bp 108 C) to concentrate early but there it is, along with esters of C6 and C8 acids. Methanol appears in all fractions and can be concentrated in later fractions depending on the composition of the liquid phase. If you can’t trust the rando internet guy who says he has a PhD in this stuff then maybe you’ll trust a random sampling of literature from his reference manager:
European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, A study on the possibilities to lower the content of methyl-alcohol in eaux-de-vie de fruits, Publications Office, 1996
Guymon, J.F. Chapter 11: Chemical Aspects of Distilling Wines into Brandy. In Chemistry of Winemaking; University of California: Davis, CA, USA, 1974; pp. 232–253
DOI: 10.1021/ba-1974-0137.ch011