In many European countries you will be offered home-distilled drinks, you would be very unlucky to get anything else than hangover.
The problem is overblown.
It's almost impossible to avoid ingesting some alcohol during the course of a natural diet, and that includes if you avoid fermented food such as bread, let alone beverages deliberately brewed to be alcoholic.
Edit: only one way round! This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I am not your doctor or drinking doula.
> Ethanol is the most commonly used antidote to block the metabolising of methanol. Ethanol works by competing with the metabolic breakdown of methanol, thereby preventing the accumulation of toxic byproducts.
MSF: https://methanolpoisoning.msf.org/en/for-health-professional...
I can see the ambiguity of my comment. I was trying to phrase as a riddle but can be interpreted both ways.
I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.
Methanol is really only present in significant amounts in fruit mashes because it comes from fermentation of pectin. Grain or sugar-derived alcohol barely has any at all.
The foreshots you throw out do have things that taste bad and which you would not want to drink much of, but even if you mixed it all back in and got drunk, it would be the same amount of all of those chemicals you’d get if you just drank the mash, which is itself basically just beer or wine.
We distillers are a lot more likely to burn our house down than any other form of injury.
Please do find those papers! They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with.
To be clear - methanol boils at 64C and ethanol boils at 78C. Are you suggesting that in standard distillation, there is still some non-trace methanol coming over at 78C? If I personally observed that in a laboratory setting, I'd quickly assume measurement error or external contamination.
From what I remember, the highest concentration of methanol is in the tails. That should tell you everything.
*EDIT* Found the paper
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/0b9...
It's not clear to me that simple distillation of a methanol/ethanol mixture can produce either pure ethanol or pure methanol at any point, just as it's impossible to distill ethanol and water to pure ethanol (absolute alcohol) if the water is above a small percentage of the mixture.
This also matches what happens when distilling ethanol from water. You can't distill pure ethanol, but you csn distill ethanol-free water afterwards.
There is always some amount of vapor pressure, even below the boiling point of a substance. Otherwise, neither water nor alcohol would evaporate by themselves at room temperature! The temperature we call the "boiling point" is just the temperature at which the vapor pressure equals the ambient pressure.
Temperature is just an average, the individual molecules can have a higher or lower temperature and can therefore evaporate already below boiling point.
It's probably pot still vs. reflux still. Chemists use fractionating columns to get better separation. Home distillers won't necessarily do so, so official advice has to assume they will not.
You can’t distill ethanol to higher than 95% because of the 95-5 ethanol-water azeotrope that boils at 78.2C, versus ethanol alone at 78.4C.
Methanol-water and methanol-ethanol don’t form an azeotrope so if properly done you can separate methanol via distillation.
If you are making brandy from clarified wine, it probably separates better than rotten grape mash.
It is still a continuum with some methanol molecules likely remaining even in the tails.
For all intents and purposes, the distiller's rule of thumb of throwing away the angels' share is still going to work because low methanol concentrations are never an issue —for the antidote for methanol is ethanol.
It’s been a long time, but I thought there was a whole Raoult’s Law thing, about partial pressures in the vapor coming off the solution combining in proportion to each component’s molar fraction * its equilibrium vapor pressure (at that temperature, presumably). Or something.
Point being, if you’re starting with a bunch of volatiles in solution, there’d be quite a bit of smearing between fractions boiling off at any given temperature/pressure. And you’d be very unlikely to get clean fractions from a single distillation anywhere in that couple-dozen-degree range.
Probably mangled the description, but isn’t that why people do reflux columns?
methanol and ethanol do not form an azeotrope with each other, they only (both, each) bind to water. that's why separation of methanol and ethanol by holding key temperatures works at all.
furthermore, the azeotrope effect only becomes relevant at concentrations beyond 90% alcohol. so when you're producing pure methanol and ethanol, then distillation won't cut it beyond 90+% as water+(m)ethanol then *at these high concentrations* boil and evaporate together. that's the grain of truth in your statement.
last not least going blind from methanol is _very_ real.
I don't think so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope_tables
But anyway, I don't think there's hazardous levels left after normal distillation+cutting, the reason for not buying booze from some guy behind a barn usually has more to do with lead contamination risks.
You shouldn't buy those, terribly expensive. Oh I don't really drin... Used to be a chap in here all the time, made his own, beautiful stuff. Ok well like I say I'm not rea... I can sell you everything you need, you should make your own gin, much cheaper. Oh, so did you drink his stuff too? Nah I'd never touch it. What but you said it was beau... Yeah he drank it and died.
Definitely up on the list of bizarre interactions I've had here.
do you mean distills? decanting is just pouring carefully
TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.
As distillation continues the concentration of methanol drops.
The highest concentration is at the start. This is also generally full of undesirable flavours.
People also forget that ethanol competitively inhibits metabolism of methanol in a way that protects healthy adults from toxicity.
A safe alcoholic drink can have methanol in it, iirc it's about 80:1 ethanol:methanol by EU rules. And generally considered tolerable [0].
What is actually toxic is much higher ratios of methanol than that.
Unless you have severely f'd up your fermentables you shouldn't even have that much methanol in the starter!
This is why everyone is disagreeing with the safety in this thread.
It's also why people wonder why so many tourist destinations have been mixing methanol into alcoholic drinks. They probably could serve drunk people high concentrations relying on ethanol already in their blood and follow up drinks to stop noticeable harm.
Probably most adults could drink 5-10% methanol (if ethanol is about 50%) and never notice the toxicity.
As opposed to the crowd sobering up and leaving.
But also I believe the bar (staff) often genuinely don't know what their serving is harmful.
I should have added the limit to safety at low levels of methanol is actually that your body processes ethanol much faster than methanol. So it's more that the crowd goes home and then hours later (once ethanol has been cleared) the methanol finally is picked up by the enzymes that makes it toxic. If they stay drunk (on ethanol) for days the methanol might have been excreted before being toxified.
So maybe the answer is water down the shots of your obviously drunk customers.
TBH, I also had to do my own bit of googling because I barely drink alcohol to begin with, but it does look like "at the start", it's not very distinguishable from ethanol in taste and in effect.
Whatever subtle differences exist between them are probably unnoticeable to people who are already drunk, not to mention drinking cocktails with all sorts of other flavors mixed in.
And I'll let you know that my shortest days are 4.5 hours long (with weak sunlight!). Oslo has slighly longer days still.
For booze above 22% ABV the tax is currently 9.23 NOK. So a 0.7 liter bottle of 40% ABV Whiskey or similar would get 258 NOK or $27 / €23 in tax.
And on top of that comes the usual 25% VAT, and high wages to our bartenders etc.
It's actually relatively cheap right now, I expect a price hike soon given how much grocery prices have increased.
This is not just question of "more expensive country, more expensive stuff". Switzerland or Luxembourg are quite expensive, but you will buy affordable and good Italian/Spanish/French wine there, because these countries don't impose anywhere near as much taxation on wine.