>And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.

This is wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.

> The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch

how did that work? did the Feds pose as some false flag bootleggers? do you have some sources I could read up on?

thing is, russia has a large tradition of home distillation (samogonka), and they too have tropes of people going blind. there have been a lot of cases of people dying because of bad alcohol, here's somewhat recent case: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/contaminated-cider-deaths-russi...

"Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them." This doesn't sound quite right. Distillation concentrates alcohols as a function of their boiling points and the temperature. Heavier alcohols have higher boiling points so methanol will be distilled faster than ethanol. This means that it is can become more concentrated in the distillate. The idea that the relative proportion of compounds can change is the whole idea of distillation in the first place. To be fair, people have been distilling alcohols just fine for a few hundred years now so clearly this can be done safely with primitive technology. But is definitely possible to increase the methanol concentration relative to ethanol through distillation and it should definitely come off the still first if you just apply heat.

Huh, I thought if you held the outlet of the still at 79c until you stopped getting distillate then you could be reasonably sure that you took out most of the the majority of the methanol.

Interesting one.

Experienced distiller here. This comment is spot on.