As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.
However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.
There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence and that's totally normal, that's what freedom is.
As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.
I forget the exact wording, but the seat belt law are a good example of it. Laws are passed to protect the populace from self harm so that society doesn't suffer from it. It probably doesn't apply here because home distillation is very niche. However, if a bunch of people show up in emergency rooms and it drives up health care costs then expect a quick reversal in policy.
There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.
Its a chicken and egg problem as well, the way we regulate and manage health care and health insurance (at least in the US) allows for costs to pretty easily bleed out to the rest of society. That implies that we must then be collectivist in other policies, though that is counter to many of the original goals of our country and the question is whether we changed those goals or inadvertantly built a system that requires changing gials after the fact.
We have a similar problem with immigration laws. Our immigration laws today are completely counter to what they once were, and counter to what is still written on the Statue of Liberty. We have immigration laws now that are necessary because of the welfare programs we implemented, even if we wanted to live up to the older ideals we couldn't without abandoning those welfare programs entirely.
It was marketing that was installed on the statute of liberty in 1903, when the U.S. was already fully developed. It doesn’t reflect the original intent at all.
It was written in 1883, as part of fundraising for the pedestal. It might not reflect precisely the "original intent" of the statue, but it's very much in line with all of the other context.
The statute of liberty was from a french admirer of the constitution and abolitionist. It was conceived at a time when Napoleon III had declared himself emperor. The connection to immigration was a completely unrelated glomming-on.
Death of the author. People sailed under the statue to get to Ellis island, it's not a difficult connection to make. The location was known when the poem was presented in 1883, 2 years before the statue arrived in the US and the author volunteered for one of the numerous aid organizations helping jewish immigrants.
The fact that people used it after the fact for marketing an unrelated issue doesn’t have anything to do with the original intent of the statue. There was a lot of ret-conning American history in the late 19th to early 20th century as a result of mass immigration.
Things can come to mean something different from what their funders intend.
It happens all the time, especially with art, language and especially public monuments.
The Statue of Liberty’s connection to Ellis island is undeniable. The national museum of immigration is part of the same monument and run by the same staff.
It’s not ret-conning to say that the Statue of Liberty is indelibly linked - physically and symbolically - to mass migration of working and lower class people. It was the busiest port of entry for more than 60 years, and more than 20 million people entered there. There are uncountable contemporaneous accounts of immigrants viewing their passing the statue as a marker of the end of the voyage, and the beginning of their life in America.
One French guy funded it for one reason. 20 million others saw it as a symbol for something different in their lives.
The full title of the statue is “La Liberté éclairant le monde”—it’s impossible not to see it as a symbol of the ideals of the Enlightenment spreading across the world. That’s the common philosophical ground of both American and French Revolutions, and from there the source of the friendship that the statue represents.
At least some minimal notion of hospitality with respect to migration is part of that Enlightenment. (Kant’s Perpetual Peace is emphatic about this; Derrida annotates the relevant section with fresh eyes in Hospitality vol. 1, the first lecture and ff.)
That said, I also agree with you that symbols are not fully formed at birth and it is not the case that what they represent never changes at all in the course of their history.
> There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.
Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporations take defensive actions against that, and you wind up with "do not take Flumitrol if you are allergic to Flumitrol" kinds of warnings everywhere. It is "individualistic" in the most narrowly narcissistic sense, which I don't think is what the founders envisioned either.
The way I see it is that enabling individualism, perhaps through strongly collective rules is very different than individualistically segmenting all sorts of experiences and protections. The latter of which, as you have noted, may not result in individualism on any sort of practical level - especially if it just lets large corporations mow down all sorts of people segmented to an individual level of power.
> whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist
Like many of these sorts of choices, its false to think of it as binary because its about choosing a place on the continuum between them.
On the methanal risk issue, one possible compromise would to have places which can run free checks on booze for methanal. Not too different from the practice in France where you can bring in mushrooms you've collected to the pharmacist who can tell you which ones are delicious and which are death incarnate. But of course this would have to be a publicly funded service which america seems to loathe ("I'd rather go blind than have a single tax dollar go to free booze testing!")
> But of course this would have to be a publicly funded service which america seems to loathe
This hasn't been my experience in the US over the last couple decades. Both parties like to complain about the other side, but they both spend money we don't have and are happy to fund new government programs as long as its their party's program.
This is a bit oxymoronic. People are a bit too happy to pick and choose what they like and otherwise pretend they're an island to themselves, but it doesn't take a communist to see the contradiction.
You're assuming its a binary rather than a spectrum though. I wouldn't expect to find anyone who is entirely individualistic or entirely collectivist.
Plenty of people would agree they're willing to pay taxes and give governments the authority to build and maintain public roads, for example. That doesn't mean they would also then be okay with government taking over industry.
Right, and I, as someone living in France and paying a hefty part of my income to fund public healthcare, understand that the state would want to limit people doing stupid shit costing the society a fortune in fixing them (though, of course, this just creates a debate on where to draw the line).
But isn't the point of non-socialized healthcare, like in the US, that you pay for care out of pocket? Or maybe via your insurance, which will probably increase your premium if you repeatedly engage in stupid actions that need expensive fixing?
Society still has paid at least for your education, depends on your working power to at least fund your dependents, and at least on some degree of reasonableness from you not to raise everyone's insurance premiums.
There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.
Either pay for my health care or get your nose out of it. If my healthcare is going to be my own private matter, then it should be just that. How insulting.
One problem with this mentality is that reality doesn't really make the ideological distinction between whats private and what isn't, or who pays for what. Healthcare is not an intersubjective field, and so actions have consequences, no matter what you think about them.
Vaccines are a good example of this, herd immunity is needed for many of them to work. Antibiotic stewardship is another, unregulated usage of antibiotics risks breeding superbugs.
More generally, "private" ideas are rarely private. Kids born to idiots practicing alternative medicine often die. This scales to societal effects if you have enough idiots. Even though capitalism makes this very fuzzy, many resources in medicine are in fact finite, meaning that time and money spent on one person might mean that another dies. Sometimes that other person is in another, usually poorer country. COVID vaccine availability illustrated that effect nicely.
Essentially what you are advocating is widespread natural selection, with potential consequences affecting anywhere from small local communities to the entire planet in rare cases (COVID is a good one, look up Trichophyton Indotineae for a recent example). And even if you actually do want that, unless you truly follow through, this also comes a huge amount of waste of very limited resources. That is unless you are willing to go the distance and advocate that unvaccinated kids with pneumonia from a measles infection should just go ahead and die because of their parents or neighbors stupid choices.
If you take Kants approach to ethics, that you should only act on principles that you would want to become a universal law, then the principle of healthcare being a private matter is a bit of a non-starter, at least by most ethical systems.
> whether it's through taxpayer-funded healthcare or higher premiums for private insurance.
Insurance should insure your risk, and that's fairly independent of what other people are doing. (Of course, other people driving dangerously can endanger your health, and thus drive up your health insurance costs.)
What you have in mind is probably a consequence of forbidding insurance companies from charging people according to risk, and forcing them to charge people some average of a pool they are placed in?
Individual heath insurance premiums aren’t linked to your behavior or health or activities (apart from smoking). Most of that was made illegal by the insurance reforms in the “ObamaCare” bill.
If many people started doing stupid things though then yes it would raise premiums for all.
Let's be honest here: there is no benefit to alcohol (for example wine) and is only detrimental. As a true French person who does want the government paying for "stupid shit" you need to call for the end of wine making and its consumption.
But I guess that might be the debate line of which you spoke.
"Let's be honest here: there is no benefit to alcohol (for example wine) and is only detrimental." - That is a pretty extreme statement and easily falsifiable.
There are many studies a quick google away that show a much more nuanced take ie [0] and [1]. But the strongest evidence is our most successful societies and civilizations have been intentionally drinking alcohol for ~10000 years [2]. If it was only detrimental then I'm pretty sure it would have worked its way out by now. I acknowledge there are negative issues.
There has been this societal whip lash where alcohol has gone from being 'good for you' to being 'poison' over the last few years.
While it is true that any amount of alcohol is technically bad for you, 'the dose makes the poison'. Drinking in moderation is relatively harmless. For example, 2 drinks / day raises one's risk of colon cancer by 6%, but that's a relative increase on top of one's ~ 4.4% lifetime risk (which also includes drinkers, so we could be double counting). So you're increasing lifetime risk to 4.7%. Do it for all cancers and you're likely increasing your total risk of death by ~ 1%. Things really only go exponential beyond ~ 20d/wk
So you have to ask yourself, is your enjoyment of the occasional beer worth the very low increased risk? For myself, the answer is yes, but I would not dream of making that decision for someone else, and I object to the government doing it for me.
I don't know, maybe? There already are laws around advertising alcohol, to the dismay of the local wine industry.
I don't have stats on hand, but I seem to remember that smoking costs much more than alcohol, despite a sizeable (1/3? not sure) proportion of car accidents being caused by the latter. Alcohol and drug use is already considered an aggravating circumstance in some situations (car crashes, assault, etc).
But yeah, I think there are activities that are clearly extremely risky and some that are clearly not. I guess alcohol lies somewhere in the middle: I never felt compelled to drive after drinking; I usually just zone out on my couch or go to bed.
There's also the fact that alcohol seems pretty much unstoppable. See how well prohibition worked in the US. Ditto for drugs and smoking, where, despite our local flavor of "war on drugs", cannabis consumption has exploded in recent years. Taxes on tobacco are extremely high here, yet many people still smoke. I understand smoking is relatively less popular than before, but people do still smoke. Alcohol consumption has also gone down, but people do still drink. Despite the communication campaigns that they're not healthy.
So I think that since there are some activities in which people tend to engage in anyway, even if they're outlawed (cannabis comes to mind), we, as a society, should figure out ways to mitigate that. Have people be accountable. Wanna do stupid shit? Knock yourself out, but don't have society bear the burden.
I don't know, as someone who mostly rides motorbikes, I wouldn't be shocked if I had to pay a premium at the hospital if I left half my face on the pavement in a crash because I figured wearing a helmet, or even serious equipment, was somehow not cool, or whatever people tell themselves to justify riding next to naked. Yes, I wear all my gear even under 40ºC. Even in the US desert, where I understand helmet wear is not mandatory. Yes, I sweat. I've only ever had a minor crash despite riding a big-ass "dangerous" crotch rocket, but I enjoy having my skin attached to my body more than not sweating. Should I pay a (lower?) premium anyway, since motorbikes are statistically more dangerous than walking? Maybe?
You must be fun at parties? Some forms of alcohol are tasty and all of them loosen inhibitions, which is beneficial for both recreation and procreation.
Obviously there are downsides too, but booze is popular for very good reasons.
Seat belt laws are an interesting example though because they only apply when driving on public roads. You can drive your car with no seat belt on a private track all day if you want to.
I don't like using seat belt laws as an example of preventing people from harming themselves.
The most important justification for seat belt laws is ensuring that drivers can maintain control when things get spicy and keep a minor event from escalating into a collision that will harm bystanders. And other innocent people in the same car who will be injured by the unbelted person being thrown around.
Agree completely, though sadly we are a very long way from this. In a lot of places it is literally illegal and prison-time just for growing certain naturally-occurring plants for purely personal use. I don't see how this ruling helps with that at all though
>There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves...A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence
Fyi, the reference to Asia is not about people killing themselves, it's about passing off inadvertantly lethal moonshine as mass-produced drinkable alcohol resulting in the deaths of other people, not yourself.
Killing yourself is one thing. Killing or crippling potentially many people is negligence terrorism. And you can forget that these guys will keep it for themselves. Purpose of alcohol is to create bonds by sharing it with others. It can go as far as bringing your homemade moonshine on local festivities and poisoning half of the locals without them realizing what has happened until it is too late.
You cannot sell homebrew (and presumably won't be able to sell distilled beverages) without a very expensive license. Homebrewers (of all forms) are generally very aware of this when they get into the hobby. Even "cute" forms of recompensation are heavily frowned upon. The most I've seen are to "pay for the glass itself".
All that is to say, the government is not harvesting tax from homebrew.
The common knowledge about methanol being a huge risk is wildly overstated in reality, and likely continues in part because it benefits the government for people to believe strongly in the danger and continue to purchase taxed liquor. Distillation does not create new chemicals: there is methanol in your bottle of wine, and distilling that wine into brandy does not change the ratio, it only removes (primarily) water. Common distilling practice is to dispose of the highest concentrations of the most volatile components (acetaldehyde, higher alcohols). Low levels of methanol remain present in a gradient throughout the distilled product. Methanol production in fermentation is not a significant risk if you're not fermenting woody materials, and its production can be mitigated through the use of pectic enzyme. Methanol IS a risk if you're starting with cheap, untaxed denatured alcohol (ethanol+methanol+bitterants+other crap) as your input, rather than the unadulterated output of a sugar fermentation, and that is mainly what gave rise to the popular methanol folklore.
That said, don't break the law, folks. It's not worth going to prison for tax evasion over a jug of shine. You can get just as tipsy off a couple glasses of fermented supermarket apple juice, and it's legal and cheaper to boot.
I...guess. But if you're drinking enough that you exceed the safe threshold for methanol consumption through its marginal presence in the distillate, while somehow managing to tolerate the ethanol, I think you've got another more pressing issue to address.
In practice the distillate actually has less undesirable crap in it than the source wine, since one typically only keeps a part of the run from the still ("hearts") and disposes of the rest.
"The common knowledge about methanol being a huge risk is wildly overstated…"
Little doubt you're correct on both counts: risk of methanol ingestion isn't high and likely government worries about a likely shortfall in its coffers. But as I inferred in my comment that risk is minimal in countries with good food/health regulations. HN is read everywhere so that's not always going to be case.
You're absolutely correct about the distillation process and that small amounts of methanol exist in wine, also one's body produces small amount of both MeOH and EtOH that aren't harmful except in very rare individuals who overproduce amounts.
The problem comes when MeOH is deliberately substituted for EtOH. In such circumstances the consumer can receive hundreds of times as much MeOH as the body is used to dealing with. The liver can normally eliminate the small amounts of naturally-produced formaldehyde and formic acid metabolites produced by alcohol dehydrogenase before any damage is done but not so when large amounts are ingested. In fact, the 100 ml figure I quoted for MeOH is at the extreme end of survivability, much lower amounts often kill.
As I said, I'm not against homebrew spirits but it's easy to envisage a situation that without proper controls and a good understanding of the dangers of MeOH substitution by the lay public (together with easy ways of testing for MeOH) that unscrupulous carpetbaggers will somehow find ways of adding MeOH—unfortunately the profit motive often nukes scruples.
From ~1906 through prohibition the Feds purposely poisoned industrial alcohol with methanol and other chemicals as a deterrent. 100 years ago, in 1926, they increased it, up to as much as 10%. This was true rotgut. Around 10,000 people, mostly poor, died from it. Blindness, organ failure, paralysis. This was legal and regulated by the Volstead Act. It was the primary source of methanol poisoning during prohibition.
This is still routinely done to avoid ethanol taxes. It's called "denatured alcohol". Ethanol that has been poisoned is not considered drinkable alcohol, so not subject to the taxes on drinkable alcohol.
Beyond the recognized "Formulas" such as Formula No. 40-B, there are a number of other "flavors" of denaturants, pages of them starting at section 21.91:
Aren't morals strange? Governments would rather poison and blind those who would imbibe ethanol when it's prohibited or when they do so without paying excise tax.
Morally and ethically such action results in a much worse outcome for society for many reasons. Unfortunately, that's not the view of many or those laws would not have been enacted. Even in our more enlightened times many still hold such punitive beliefs as witnessed by some posts here on HN. It seems to me opinion on whether or not alcoholic beverages ought to be permitted in society has been around so long and yet still remains so divided that the chasm will likely never close.
Fortunately, where I live (Australia) the toxic denaturants in ethanol (methanol (~15℅) and pyridine (~3%)) were removed quite some decades ago and replaced with a nontoxic denaturant—the bitterant denatonium.
We nevertheless still have a lingering reminder of the past: the once non-potable ethanol was called "Methylated Spirits" and its replacement still is! Nowadays, the methanol and pyridine are gone and what's always been colloquially nicknamed "Metho" is still labeled "Methylated Spirits" but now only consists of 95% ethanol and 5% water—the trace amount of denatonium denaturant isn't even mentioned on the label but it's definitely there.
An interesting observation: the old toxic methylated ethanol was emblazoned with the word "POISON" whereas our new Metho sans MeOH is only labeled "CAUTION".
BTW, above I mentioned the chasm never closing, whilst writing this my earlier post has oscillated wildly around a net 0, I now have the same number of votes that I started with before posting. Seems opinions are even more divided on this subject than I'd ever imagined (damn shame HN only tallies totals and not both up and down votes).
Yep, never forget. The government literally poisoned people. Anytime I mention this I get eye rolls and immediate dismissal as a kook. It's quite frustrating.
Note that we are talking about industrial alcohol, which was not made for human consumption but could be distilled to make it palatable (before the toxic additives were added).
They made it sound as if they were poisoning alcohol intended for drinking (looks like it was possibly edited or I missed that it said industrial). Methanol and other additives are still added to most industrial alcohol today.
"Methanol and other additives are still added to most industrial alcohol today."
Depends in which country you reside. Where I am the denaturants methanol and pyridine were removed decades ago and replaced with the nontoxic bitterant denatonium.
Well, I live in a country with both huge distillation culture and significantly non-zero number of methanol poisonings, and they never happen from home brewing. It's really hard to homebrew/distill methanol in a quantity enough to poison you in an otherwise ethanol solution (which acts as an antidote).
It's so rare this thread is literally the first time I've heard about possibility of methanol poisoning from homebrewing.
Methanol poisonings happen from bootlegging, where someone in the chain of supply sells industrial methanol as an ethanol, because the first one is cheaper, easier to obtain and untaxed.
Homebrewing isn't the issue per se. Methanol from fruit and stuff people normally ferment is pretty negligible. The problem happens when the spirit is sold and broken down/stretched to go futher by middlemen by adding cheaper MeOH.
Unfortunately, that has happened enough times with people dying for it to be a problem. Seems some societies are more susceptible to these extremely dangerous ripoffs than others.
Isn't that an issue with alteration and distribution rather than risk during production for self consumption and could happen for just about any product?
I didn't say they did. If you think this ruling (if upheld) won't change things then you're kidding yourself
In Poland and other European countries where home distillation has been practiced for centuries nothing would happen but an instant cultural shift in the US with a major uptake in homebrewing certainly will. Ratbags and carpetbaggers will find ways to get in on the act and that's when the trouble will start.
this is wrong and dangerious! Home brewing very well can cause methanol poinonings. It doesn't happen often because the process is complex enough to get settup that anyone likey talk to someone (or read a book) and get the simple process to avoid it (throw out the beginnigs of each batch since the harmful stuff comes first).
It is not a myth. It might be overblown (in the typical home batch sizes there probably isn't enough methanol to worry about anyway.) However methanol will start to boil out first and so the head will have measurable more methanol than latter - this is the basic physics of distillation. You won't get all the methanol out by discarding the head (again this is how distillation works), but you will get an elevated portion.
The myth is that a home distiller can unknowingly produce something that is poisonous due to methanol.
Your statement about methanol being in the heads is also wrong, because the evaporative properties change when you have ethanol, methanol, and water all mixed together. It's not as simple as the naive "lower boiling point means it comes out first".
I concluded from that, distillation cannot be used to concentrate alcohol. I'm on chemist, but I know enough to know that your article fails the sniff test - it is taking some facts but it is misapplying them.
If that's the conclusion you drew from that article, you either didn't read large sections of it or failed to understand it. Not sure how to help you but to suggest you try again.
The principle is the same reason why when you distill at 180 degrees, you do not wind up with a distillate with zero water in it.
Sure you don't get zero water at 180 degrees - but you get less water which is why we can distill alcohol at all to remove water. Likewise you get more methanol in the early stages - that doesn't mean you get it all in the early stages, but you will get an elevated amount.
Exactly, now you've got it! The last caveat is that while methanol is slightly elevated in the heads, it's not meaningfully so. It's present throughout the run at nearly the same concentration. There just isn't enough methanol in a home brew to produce a meaningful early spike. And you certainly do not discard all or even a majority of the methanol if you toss the heads.
And this is why home brewing and distillation cannot cause methanol poisoning.
In small batches. In very large batches there is enough to be a concern. Where the line is, is something I don't know but you better figure out if you are going to make concentrated alcohol.
I'm not talking about homebrew bootlegging here. It's large-scale frauds where industrial ethanol (which often contains poisonous amounts of methanol, or _is_ methanol) is mixed with flavorants and colorants to cheaply imitate various hard drinks.
Small-scale distillation is fine. Ten bottles of wine have 500mg of methanol, which is mostly fine for most people even if it all ends up in the same shot -- which it won't; it'll be split between 1-2 750ml bottles even if you do absolutely nothing to remove it from the ethanol.
Batches under a certain size don't have a problem with methanol poisoning. You need a large enough batch that you get a high percentage of methanol in the "heads". Usually for batches under 100L, it's not an issue. A sensible policy would be limiting "home" distillation to 50L batches (which is a lot of booze; hard to argue you need more than that in a batch for private consumption).
The methanol doesn't "come out in the heads" and batch size doesn't affect the final concentration as a % because roughly the same ratio is present during a run with a slight in crease in the tails due to the with methanol bonds with water.
Interestingly, after looking at this more closely, what I said is true of rakija, which is what I'm most familiar with (part of my family is Serbian), but appears to not be significantly true for grain distillates. Your sources mostly don't address these topics though; the latter one is mainly about copper and lead levels.
There is precisely 0 methanol risk in distilling grain based alcohol. The quantity of methanol produced is minuscule a the antidote is ethanol which is also present. Any methanol poisoning is from adulteration with industrial alcohol which has large volumes of methanol added intentionally to make it undrinkable.
The way you're saying it is deeply irresponsible. The way to deal with methanol poisoning is not "just ethanol", and you cannot "cure yourself" by drinking everclear.
If you ever find out you have been drinking methanol by all means do drink safe spirits if you have immediate access to them (after throwing up what you can if you're still in time), but get medical help now. Ethanol will not cure you from methanol poisoning, it will only help reduce and delay the damage somewhat while you're waiting for an ambulance or making your way to a hospital to get proper treatment.
Worth noting that even in clinical settings, ethanol has largely been replaced by fomepizole (Antizol) as the preferred antidote. It's more predictable, easier to dose, and doesn't come with the side effect of making a critically ill patient drunk. Ethanol is the field expedient, not the standard of care.
You're not going to get any sort of concerning level of methanol though from home distilling unless you're collecting and drinking just the heads. You'd have to be trying, and even then it would be difficult. It's basically impossible.
Any amount of methanol you're getting from home distilling is going to be easily and safely canceled with alcohol.
While the treatment for methanol poisoning indeed includes ethanol, I don’t think your dosage suggestion is right. Your body would still have to process all the methanol, the job of the ethanol is just to slow down the reaction. If you suspect methanol poisoning you need the hospital, they will administer the ethanol intravenously and I think do dialysis to remove the methanol and the formic acid it metabolizes to (this is one of the toxins in ant venom)
negligence (especially via ignorance) is a thing. a hobbyist wanting to celebrate their first batch with their buddies can poison them with some smeared hearts. but i get what you’re saying.
First, if they are not using anything with pectin in it, there isn't a significant amount of methanol at all worth measuring.
Second, if they did use fruit skins in the fermentation stage, there still isn't enough methanol to compete with the ethanol, (which is the cure to methanol poisoning) with out intentionally poisoning the batch.
> ethanol, (which is the cure to methanol poisoning)
Now that is completely incorrect. There is no way to prevent metabolism of methanol once it has been ingested, ethanol just competes with it for metabolisis.
Alcohol fermented from fruit byproduct is extremely common in many cultures. It is asinine to think that only grain will be used once this is legalised.
If you don't get on dialysis within 24 hours of drinking more than 30mL of ethanol there is high risk of blindness, and higher doses can easily cause death.
"Methanol poisoning can be treated with fomepizole or ethanol.[19][22][23] Both drugs act to reduce the action of alcohol dehydrogenase on methanol by means of competitive inhibition. Ethanol, the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages, acts as a competitive inhibitor by more effectively binding and saturating the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme in the liver, thus blocking the binding of methanol. Methanol is excreted by the kidneys without being converted into the toxic metabolites formaldehyde and formic acid. "
So completely correct.
>Alcohol fermented from fruit byproduct is extremely common in many cultures. It is asinine to think that only grain will be used once this is legalised.
Not what I was saying at all. You could use grain, or sugar (cheapest and easiest). That said, the levels are not significantly high enough to poison you unless someone is trying to poison you. It's not happening when making alcohol to drink.
From the link you posted
>Administering patients with controlled doses of either ethanol or fomepizole is standard practice.
Again, what I said is completely correct, your own source confirmed it.
Secondly, also from the article
>Bootleg brewers also sometimes add enough methanol to informally produced spirits to cause serious health effects.
Again, as I said, someone intentionally trying to poison you.
>Both commercial and home-distilled alcohols exhibited methanol concentrations remarkably below the 0.35 % limit for brandy set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
From how I'm reading this, you're disagreeing with the parent but your quotes actually support what they wrote? Ethanol is not an antidote or "cure", it's more or less an attempt at dilution. There are other posts in this thread explaining why it's dangerous to believe that methanol poisoning can simply be counteracted with ethanol.
>Bootleg brewers also sometimes add enough methanol to informally produced spirits to cause serious health effects.
I don't think the "to" here is meant to imply intent. It's "enough to", referring to the amount. I don't know where the notion comes from that people try to intentionally poison people with moonshine. Maybe in a Columbo episode. It happens when people cut corners or don't pay attention or get scammed.
The US Govt did it during prohibition. It has been retconned by wacky homebrew fringe into a belief that all poisonings are due to adulteration, probably by Big Alcohol.
“As methanol is highly soluble in water, it will distil over more at the end of distillations when vapours are richer in water. That means, methanol will appear in almost equal concentration in almost all fractions of pot still distillation in reference to ethanol (i.e., as g/hL pa), until the very end where it accumulates in the so-called tailings fraction. However, even today many professional distillers believe that methanol concentrates preferably in the first fractions.”
Hernández, J. A., Wörner, S., & Riedl, K. (2021). Methanol Mitigation during Manufacturing of Fruit Spirits with Special Regard to Novel Coffee Cherry Spirits. Foods, 10(5), 994.
Alcohol is not an antidote! It only competes with enzyme binding to slow the production of fomic acid.
Fomepizole costs thousands of dollars and is often unstocked for that reason in many countries, although I guess it will become stocked in the US now. Dialysis machines are also in short supply. One mass poisoning event would overwhelm available dialysis resources in a state.
>>Bootleg brewers also sometimes add enough methanol to informally produced spirits to cause serious health effects.
> Again, as I said, someone intentionally trying to poison you.
No, someone in the supply chain making cash. Someone swapped in some 20% methanol and hoped it would go unnoticed.
You can cherry pick a study from Texas where there are hardcore home distillers, but that won't change what happens when a heap of amateurs across the country do it.
> A 10% ethanol solution administered intravenously is a safe and effective antidote for severe methanol poisoning. Ethanol therapy is recommended when plasma methanol concentrations are higher than 20 mg per dl, when ingested doses are greater than 30 ml and when there is evidence of acidosis or visual abnormalities in cases of suspected methanol poisoning.
I wonder whether government testing actually makes a material difference in food/beverage safety.
For example, when I worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I was surprised to discover that the percentage of imported food/beverage actually tested for safety is very low. Like comically, microscopically, unbelievably low.
In the United States, I suspect concerns over reputation and civil litigation do more to keep our food safe than government testing.
Funding for inspection agencies has been cut again and again, and likewise mandated lab testing, on the basis of industry self regulation and the low number of incidents in commercial production. Many sources will be even more rigorous than we could imagine.
I think that incidents elsewhere have often been caused by substituting expensive taxed industrial ethanol for cheap industrial methanol. Which is an insane thing to do but money is money.
Until another mass poisoning occurs we will continue trusting paperwork.
Most of methanol poisoning during the Prohibition happened because the government deliberately poisoned ethanol supplies, to prevent them from being converted to drinking spirits. This insane policy caused 10 to 50 thousands deaths. There's no good data about how many died from moonshine methanol poisoning, but likely, outside of prohibition years, the numbers are in low tens per year.
Methanol/CH3OH/MeOH is poisonous and its consumption causes a life-threatening health crisis that often results in death or permanent blindness. As little as 100 ml of methanol can kill or cause lifelong damage to one's health.
One shouldn't have to restate these well-known facts but they have to be repeated at every opportunity because in many ways methanol too closely resembles ethanol/EtOH, it tastes the same and induces drunkenness, and consumers may not become aware they have consumed it until its toxic effects manifest. By then, it's often too late.
Methanol's similarly to ethanol and that it's a very important industrial chemical made and used in huge qualities that makes it doubly dangerous. Many ways exist for methanol to enter the food chain both accidentally and through deliberate substitution for ethanol so it's especially important that strict regulations exist covering its handling and use.
Outside of lab grade reagents, methanol should always be denatured in ways that make its consumption both obvious and intolerable, that's best achieved by adding the denaturant denatonium (benzoate or saccharinate) in trace amounts that have little or no effect on methanol's final use.
Denatonium (aka, Bitrix, Bitrex and others), a quaternary ammonium compound, is a bitterant and likely the bitterest substance known and can be tasted by humans in parts per billion. Not only is it extremely bitter but unlike lemons it's a nasty bitterness that lingers and will immediately alert anyone who tastes it (I know, having deliberately tasted it).
HN is read internationally, so in places with good methanol handling regulations there's little doubt I'm sounding like an annoying schoolteacher overstating the obvious but from my experience many people do not know how dangerous methanol really is. As mentioned, one reads of travelers in foreign countries poisoned with drinks laced with methanol without giving a thought where their drinks originate (moreover the most vulnerable are those who come from places with good food regulations as they automatically assume what they're served is suitable for consumption).
My rave isn't to put the kibosh on homebrew spirits as I'm essentially in favor of this decision—government already dictates too many things we citizens cannot do. That said, there has to be strict regulations concerning distillation methods and commercial sales should definitely be unlawful with tough penalties.
Finally, whether this decision hold up under appeal or not, we need readily-available methanol detectors that are both cheap and portable and that anyone can easily use.
Methanol is dangerous. But you are simply misinformed about the risk of methanol showing up in your homebrew spirits. It's not your fault: this has been a propagandized issue. But methanol poisoning was only a thing during the prohibition because the feds started poisoning the fuel ethanol supply with it, and people either served it to people unwittingly, maliciously, or tried and failed to separate out the ethanol.
In real homebrew, you are not at risk of methanol poisoning. If you brew some beer (step 1 to making yourself whiskey), the alcohol makeup ends up being in a 1:1000 ratio of methanol to ethanol. Distilling does not create any more methanol, it merely concentrates it. Let's play out the worst possible scenario here, where you're targeting azeotropic ethanol, and specifically targeting methanol with your cuts. In order to end up with a 100ml of methanol, you would need to be running a batch of targeting 100L (26 gallons) of ethanol, which means starting with 2,000L (530 gallons) of beer. That is wildly outside the range of casual home distilling.
And keep in mind in order to hit that worst case scenario, the distiller needs to know enough to be making cuts, but not know to discard the first cut, which is done normally even without methanol concerns simply because it contains a bunch of really disgusting aromatics.
"But you are simply misinformed about the risk of methanol showing up in your homebrew spirits."
I did not say that. I'm sick of being misquoted (at least twice to this story).
I well know that methanol only appears in trace amounts in drinking spirits (also naturally in trace amounts in one's gut/body sans drinking—it's even in fruit juice). That is not what I was talking about. What I said was:
"Many ways exist for methanol to enter the food chain both accidentally and through deliberate substitution for ethanol…"
In that paragraph I made no mention of homebrew spirits and it's clear I was referring to methanol manufactured in industry on an industrial scale. Industrially-manufactured methanol has found its way into the food chain and has killed people.
You should read my reply to reisse where I make it clear how methanol could enter the food chain (right, I also mentioned it earlier).
It's pretty obvious to me that if a large cultural rush/sudden fad to homebrew spirits were to happen (assuming the decision is upheld) then things will in all probability go wrong unless there's a broad reeducation about the potential for methanol substitution coupled with regulations covering sales especially through third parties.
I'm specifically referring to the US here, the entrepreneurial nature of business being what it is this decision will be seen by some (and a few is too many) to run amok and start trading HB spirits in ways traditional homebrewers would never (or very rarely) do
It's also worth reading the link on methanol poisoning in my reply to pessimizer.
> Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.
Another way to increase safety is to reduce the availability of illegal stills without quality control by enforcing the ban.
(Anyone who thinks otherwise presumably also thinks all hard drugs should be legalized since this presumably wouldn't lead to an increase in consumption.)
I think hard drugs being legal would greatly increase the amount of responsible consumption. Methamphetamine used to be purchaseable from any pharmacy over the counter in the US, and there was not a meth crisis at that time. Now there is.
>Another way to increase safety is to reduce the availability of illegal stills without quality control by enforcing the ban.
I can see you're lacking some knowledge on what makes up a still, as well as it's completely legal use for distillation of water.
A still is just a bucket with a heat source and some vapor collector and condenser. It's easy to build from a couple of pickle jars and hot glue if you're determined.
> (Anyone who thinks otherwise presumably also thinks all hard drugs should be legalized since this presumably wouldn't lead to an increase in consumption.)
Why should the government be in the business of reducing consumption? Do you believe alcohol to be immoral, and the government's role to be enforcing morality?
I do think heroin is dangerous, but I'd favor regulation (such as we do for alcohol, which is also dangerous, though certainly less so) over prohibition. By far the most dangerous aspect of heroin and all the illicit opiates is that you don't know what you're actually getting. Makes it extremely easy to unintentionally overdose.
However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.