That’s the same as my understanding. I seem to recall that even if you don’t bother properly disposing the “heads” and “tails” of your distillate, that the amount of methanol present will only give you a bad hangover, but not even come close to causing blindness. That said, I don’t have the chemistry or medical background to confirm this. If anyone knows for sure, I’d be curious. The only blindness cases I’ve heard from hooch was when the moonshine was deliberately cut with methanol.
You don’t get methanol from distilling fermented beverages, you get something I think is called fusil alcohol, which tastes nasty and is bad for you. You can also get a permit to distill a limited amount of ethanol for use as fuel very easily. Re: Repurposing a still, it’s still a still and the feds can take it if they want. If it’s just a copper pot I doubt they could get a conviction based on owning a still, but you may never see it again.
Yes you do, especially if you start with a fruit base high in pectin. Fusel alcohols are another thing altogether. Even commercial spirits have some methanol in them.
Sorry, should have said the methanol isn’t the big problem.
That is my understanding, yes, that the whole “you’ll go blind!!!” if you improperly distill alcohol is a bunch of nonsense.
The only way you can really get poisoned by distilled beverages is if it has been cut or if it was made in a lead soldered still.
The sources I have found give a methanol concentration of roughly 3 parts per million for a fermented sugar wash. A dose of methanol as low as 10 mL can damage your optic nerves, although drinking ethanol with it will vastly decrease the danger. To get 10 mL of methanol you would have to concentrate pure methanol from a 3000 liter batch of wash.
That would be quite difficult even if you were trying to accomplish this.
A more likely scenario is that poorly distilled alcohol will give you a massive hangover.
If you are going for a fancier batch than from a sugar wash, say, making it from apple cider, you might get up to 400 ppm (if you used pectic enzyme and fermented at a high temperature with additional sugars to get to at least 12% alcohol).
To get the dose of 10 mL, you would have to perfectly concentrate a much smaller batch of only 25 liters.
Um…!
Ego insists I clarify that while this thread was opened on my account, I was not the author of the OP. I’m assuming it was someone who authored the OP that at that time was staying with us for a while during a rough spot in his life. I was then a still a cop (for a very large metropolitan department, just a “tad” bigger than 460 people) and remained with that department until 2007 when I retired after 25 years and then continued part-time with another agency to “stay in the game”, so to speak.
This is not the first time I’ve seen zombie threads that were opened on my account but not authored by me. My kids, my brother, my brother in-law, they’ve all posted under my account unbeknownst to me. But it was my fault for not signing out when I left my computer. 20 lashes with the wet noodle for me!!!
-Peter King Beitz
In this video here,the guy is using nothing but yeast and sugar for a wash, and then distills it four times. What does the subsequent distillations do to the overall methanol content, anything?
So if I, say, decided to try and distill some homemade wine…from about 5 liters of wine “wash”, do I run the risk of making too much “wood” alcohol vs “grain” alcohol? (Just in case I droppped the bottle and some of it accidentally splashed into my mouth.)
A common cause of blindness (and death) IIRC was lead poisoning. Not just from the revenoors - one old hillbilly recipe used handy premade condensers in the form of used automobile radiators; the distillate would dissolve the lead solder and contaminate the final product.
So the obvious answer is, it’s very different than making wine or beer - you are playing with fire, with interesting chemistry, with explosive vapours and highly flammable substances, and - they don’t get tax revenue.
If you distill anything that was drinkable before distillation, you won’t get a more dangerous product as long as you either follow proper distillation technique and discard the heads and tails or if you collect all the distillate in one container. The only way you could selectively concentrate methanol is if you took the heads (first part that evaporates) from multiple batches and continued concentrating it.