Man…is the need for alcohol *that *desperate?
Yes. That’s what alcoholism is, a desperate desire for it.
Quoted for impact and example of truth.
People will attempt to eat rocks for hunger–and a pathology can be as essential as any instinctive life force.
As a personal aside, as shocking to me, perhaps, as this is to Velocity, is learning about the desperate and almost unthinkable ways the mentally ill will endeavor to end their lives.
I have never heard of cooking brew. Grains are cooked only in the begaining to extract sugars. The only other reason for cooking is to distill the alcohol after the yeast has quit working.
The original article contains this epic quote (epic to speakers of English English as opposed to American English)
“the Peter J. Pitchess Detention Center in Santa Clarita Valley – hatched a scheme to let inmates pick grapes at a winery and shag golf balls at a local driving range.”
I didn’t know it was physically possible to “shag golf balls”.
Thank you for this by the way. Very entertaining.
Considering their only source of heat is the hot water tap in their cell, they aren’t so much cooking it as heating to aid fermentation.
You don’t know the half of it. A cop at one of those anti drug seminars explained some of the bad shit people were doing for a high or to get drunk. Take a foot long loaf of french bread, trim the ends to make a cylinder, pour a bottle of liquid shoe polish through the bread, drink what comes out at the bottom.
Yeah, I caught that one.
I was wondering because hot water from a tap (around 50C) gets into the yeast killing territory. I guess if you just dunk it in that water, you’ll be fine and speed the process up. Might affect the flavor negatively a bit but, well, flavor is not what we’re going for in prison hooch, after all…
So, we’ve established that:
- people will go to great lengths to alter their reality, if only for a little while
- fermentation is a basic principle that can be practiced just about anywhere
- jayjay197575 doesn’t know what it is talking about
- When given a choice, the red is preferable to the white
- zombies like hooch too
Remember that distillation is just concentrating the products of fermentation.
So while yeast mainly produce ethanol during anerobic digestion, they do also produce some methanol. The problem is that methanol is rather toxic, and the concentration provided by distillation is enough to make the end result lethal, if the early fraction (containing most of the methanol) is not discarded.
What part of the precipitate of shoe polish gets you high? Real question.
To clear up any confusion among non-Americans, shagging balls means retrieving balls after they’ve been hit out into a field. It started as a baseball term.
Well, a rich gal will drink good pineapple juice
And a poor gal will do quite the same.
Yeah, but my gal she drinkin’ old shoe polish
You know she’d get drunk just the same
- My Gal, The Lovin’ Spoonful
Shoe polish often contains ethanol and methanol to speed the drying process. It’s something you drink when you’d rather be dead than sober, like kerosene or sterno.
I’ve heard stories of soldiers doing the same thing w/ Aqua Velva during WWII.
My understanding is that typically the stories you hear about people going blind or dying from illegal spirits is because they’ve been cut with antifreeze or industrial methanol, not improperly distilled. I’ve researched this before and it seems that even if you don’t discard the “heads,” you’ll at worst suffer from a nasty hangover and the amount of alcohol you would need to drink to get methanol poisoning would kill you before you reach that point.
Yeah, there isn’t too much detail on how much methanol you can get in fermented beverages, and I did search. I would suspect that when distilling a large batch of mash directly into a jug, the “heads” could well be collected into a single jug that might have sufficient methanol toxicity. But I also know that the bigger risk for drinking moonshine was distillers using piping with lead in it, or car radiators with glycol residue, even if they did not cut the product with methanol.
I imagine that this is part of why cheap-ass wines like MD20/20 are so bad. They skip the expense of removing the head or tail of the distilling run and pass the misery on to the consumer.
Wines are not distilled. ETA: But, wait, is Mad Dog fortified? So, maybe, but I would suspect that cheap grain spirits industrially distilled would be careful to keep the methanol content down.
Not to hijack, but is it common for alcoholic criminals to emerge from prison de-toxed, due to being deprived of alcohol?
Thanks. So it’s not the precipitate, it’s the solvent…and, FTR, the separated components were trapped by baguette-filtration, meaning they weren’t precipitates by definition, and I was unwisely showing off some misunderstood fancy vocabulary.
So I learned two things. Three, if you count learning there is even such a thing as bread filtration.
ETA: Four, counting the song reference.