Industrial alcohol and prohibition

[FXMastermind]

@engineer_comp_geek

ETA: The biggest thing that helped gasoline production in the 1920’s era was the introduction of tetraethyl lead (TEL). Before that, gasoline engines used to knock horribly. Alcohol doesn’t knock as much (it has a higher octane rating, meaning that you can compress it more before it spontaneously combusts). TEL drastically reduced gasoline knocking, which made gasoline a much better alternative.

It’s ironic that after lead was outlawed, the replacement turned out to be far worse for living things. The problem was solved by adding ethanol to increase the octane.

If only they had known way back when lead was being studied …

oh wait. They did know of course, that ethanol raised the octane of gasoline.

[bump]

@TroutMan

But “poor distillation” more likely means you get everything - heads, hearts, and tails - and in that case, you’d have to drink enough that you’ll have other issues before you can consume enough methanol.

Right- essentially the distillate isn’t going to have any more methanol than the fermented product started out with. So drinking 4 shots of “poorly distilled” booze (as TroutMan describes above) will have roughly the same amount of methanol as drinking 4 beers worth or 4 wine glasses worth of the fermented starting product. In the shot, you’ve just got rid of a lot of the excess water and other stuff.

Now if you did something dumb like distilled it like you normally would, and you actually bottled and sold the heads and foreshots, you could conceivably make someone blind, as that would be all of the methanol and other stuff like that all concentrated together (why it’s distilled separately from the mostly ethanol “hearts”).

That’s more a matter of being cheap and crooked than a distillation problem, and only a small percentage of bottles would be that way anyway; most would be ok.