Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/11/texas-judges-ruling-may-legalize-moonshine-making.html
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Here come the methanol poisonings!
France also all-but-outlawed home distilling. They did so by allowing distilling only with a license… and then stopping giving out licenses. However, people can be literally grandfathered in to licenses, as these can be transferred (usually through generations), so there still is a (steadily-dwindling) amount of home distillers scattered around the country.
(I may be wrong in my recounting. This was told to me by friends in the Alps around a delicious bottle of homemade Genepi liquor)
Anyhow, a key technical risk in distilling is separating out the first (last?) fraction containing methanol, which as you may know, is a poison that can end up making you blind.
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It is legal to distill alcohol for use as fuel. I don’t know what the restrictions are concerning what one would fuel. Here is the link to apply for a license.
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The early fractions contains compounds with lower boiling points, like methanol. So you’d throw out the first fraction.
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And the last is mostly water, so you throw out both the heads and the tails. But to do this safely at home, you need far more sophisticated equipment than most home kits I’ve seen. Methanol and associated compounds are seriously no bueno, and although I am a pretty serious home brewer, I do not foresee ever venturing into this area. To likely to kill my friends and family!
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alcoholic beverage industry lobbyist 
Governor and others “Uhh, Judge Pittman… could we have a word with you?”
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An adult can make 100 gallons of wine and 100 gallons of beer every year for personal or family use.
The homebrewing exception for beer is: Title 27 (25)(L) section 20.205:
(1) 200 gallons per calendar year if there are two or more adults residing in the household, or
(2) 100 gallons per calendar year if there is only one adult residing in the household.
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Good, people should be allowed to distill.
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Mark Pitman Northern District of Texas appointed by Trump.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-blocks-rule-capping-credit-card-late-fees-8-2024-05-10/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/11/10/student-loan-forgiveness-texas-lawsuit/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/us/business-development-race-affirmative-action.html
bit of a powertripper.
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At points in my life I’ve been both a chemist and a serious home brewer, but I wouldn’t be concerned about killing anybody with home distillation–as long as you’re reasonably cautious about dumping the first fractions,
Here’s a reasonably detailed description of the process. Looks like you’d also want to dump the second fraction (the heads) because it’ll contain ethyl acetate, which isn’t terribly toxic but in large amounts is going to make your finished product taste bad.
The last factions you’ll want to dump because they taste bad and that’s where the fusel alcohols end up.
I’m not so concerned about trace amounts of methanol–you typically get a tiny amount in beer and fruit juices and a bit more in wine and fruit beer. Concentrating that methanol is the risk.
Having said that, I don’t have any interest in distillation–I rarely drink anything stronger than cider or wine these days.
Edit: finished thought.
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Ehhhh… I’m pretty well convinced that all, or nearly all, of methanol poisonings from moonshine were people doing horrendous stuff to their wash or the distillate in order to increase profits. A fair number of other poisonings came from patent medicines (“Jamaica Ginger” is perhaps the most famous) that also contained horrendous stuff.
But you just can’t make enough methanol to poison anyone with any normal fermentation process - from grain, fruit, or sugar. The chemical reactions to get there just aren’t possible. And remember, a still doesn’t make anything - it only separates, or fractions, one thing from another. If there’s enough methanol in the distillate to hurt you, it was present in the wash that went into the still.
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If you drink 100% of a beer/wine/mead, you are getting the same amount of methanol as you would in distilling it and drinking 100% of what comes off the still. It is actually easier to consume dramatically less methanol by distilling than drinking beer by getting rid of the first bit that comes out (which taste bad to begin with, and causes worse hangover. Most cheaper distilling companies cut less of the foreshots/heads than they should, which is why cheap booze gives you a nasty hangover.) There isn’t a magical way that distilling adds methanol to the end product.
The going blind urban legend was more due to additives that the US government added to mass produced ethanol (for fuel/medical sterilizing agent) to deter people from re-distilling it for drinking purposes. They have long stopped doing so, using bittering agents instead.
The biggest dangers to home distilling are flames (ethanol vapor is very flammable). Another minor danger is storage, both the flammability of high proof alcohol as well as leaching plasticizers from plastic (which is a hormone disrupter).
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Perhaps in the sense that people should be able to explore their interests in a free republic, but the reality is that 99.9% of the people who have approached me as “home distillers” are the last people who should be doing it. It is the perfect combination of hubris, ignorance and a complete lack of comprehension of the factors at play; the very definition of “internet smart”. Not to paint people with a broad brush, but those who are unwilling to give it the forethought this forum has already displayed are precisely the ones who do it anyway.
The unit linked in the article is actually very capable of safe home distillation… sort of. At least the separation part. The reason you shouldn’t buy one is that it is a pressurized gas bomb that most users will idiotically run on their home range, very likely with a live fire. That still is perfectly capable of separating the three phases of spirit, but also has numerous modes of failure: no obvious over/under pressure device, narrow vapor path (ie. clogging, which leads to)… clamped parts that won’t fail in a pressurizing event (ie, continue to build pressure until copper/steel bows like a balloon) and eventually the whole room is filled with hot alcohol solution and explosive vapor. And if one of those issues don’t create a self-sustaining incendiary device (better hope the flame got blown out during the initial explosion!), the absolutely inadequate coolant feed (most likely from a soft tube that can be crimped) will ensure that you also create an alcohol vapor torch when it all goes up! Google “home distillation fire” or thereabouts. It’s so common it doesn’t even get reported in national press unless it’s really bad. People burn down their homes/themselves all. the. time. See also: turkey fryers and gas BBQs.
Which brings us to the methanol question. Not the only deadly molecule, but the most prevalent and the one with some of the most immediate and devastating consequences. The fact is that in a 1:1 distillation of a “beer” (wash, mash, etc), there can be no more methanol than was in the original beer. Distillation doesn’t create methanol, it simply refines it along with all other molecules in solution. The real problem with methanol is that the “cuts” mentioned by others here are often sold to poorer populations, usually urban POC, by unscrupulous moonshiners (what do you think the destination of those proto-NASCAR drivers was?). Because the methanol etc. have been separated from the final collected spirit (hearts), they have now become far more concentrated than they were in the beer as @anonotwit (and @Fireonyx while I’m still typing) points out. Methanol poisoning is intentional. And racist.
Yup.
This is exemplary of home distillation misinformation. The writer is actually employing some good technique (compartmentalizing fractions into sequential vessels to better analyze them comparatively), but then fails to grasp the core constituency of the solution. To wit:
Covering the jars with coffee filters or cheesecloth and letting them sit overnight is also good practice as it allows the harsh chemicals to evaporate, so you know what to discard or keep.
No. Just, no. Yes, I’m sure the free vapors find their way out of the vessel, perhaps deceiving you that you have a properly fractioned solution, but you have no more caused fractionating by letting it sit in a still vessel at ambient temperature than you would find all the alcohol evaporated out of a bottle or whiskey if you left the cork out… that’s not how solutions work. And they’re either confusing numerous terms or they think there are up to six cuts (there are three… four perhaps if you are using a Charente or distilling proper absinthe, but none of their terminology is relevant to those processes).
These portions are called foreshots, heads, hearts, dunder, tails, and feints.
Lots of distillery-tour gibberish, that. Cuts are one of the easiest and earliest skills to master. You are equipped with the most sophisticated analytical equipment known to humankind; your olfactory. If poop, death and spoilage smell bad to you, so do (most) molecular poisons. Masters may develop enough of a palate to understand how to manipulate the cuts for longer vs short-term aging, but separating poison is dead simple. If you can’t tell, you shouldn’t be doing it (and those “home distillers” I mention can’t, apparently).
Also: boiling points of molecules ≠ expression in the spirit. They “mostly” come out in order of volatility, but research by Dr Berglund at MSU has shown that methanol specifically seems to fraction out at various points during the run. I’ll post the actual research if I can find it.
@Fireonyx also brings up a good point about denaturing, though I wonder how much properly-denatured spirit caused poisonings vs. illicit moonshine. If The Master is to believed, far more than I would have assumed.
Oh, and the last thing about moonshine; it is a travesty and an affront to good whiskey distillers everywhere. At least in the sense that most Americans know it. It is sub-grade white sugar rum with corn thrown in for “flavor”, such as it is. It is not even remotely “whiskey”, which is always and forever 100% grain with no other fermentable substrate added. Period.
Refined sugar ferments rapidly, which leads to spoilage and opportunistic bacterial/fungal infections which are almost never deadly, but certainly make a whole lot of foul, food-spoilage compounds. Your body rejects these compounds for a reason.
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Refined sugar ferments rapidly, which leads to spoilage and opportunistic bacterial/fungal infections which are almost never deadly, but certainly make a whole lot of foul, food-spoilage compounds. Your body rejects these compounds for a reason.
You have that backwards. The faster the ferment, the better to prevent other organisms from getting a foot-hold. Which is why already fermented food has such a long “safe to consume” life (pickles, kimchi, beer, etc). Fermenting lowers the pH (makes it acidic, both bacteria (pickles/kimchi) and yeast (beer)) and also creates ethanol (mostly just yeast), which is another preservative. The reason sugar ferments are kinda nasty is that there isn’t much nutrients for the yeast, stressing them out, which causes them to make other alcohols and compounds, including methanol. While distilling it separates out these to some degree, it isn’t a hard separation (you would need either a molecular sieves or multiple runs through a pot still or a single run with a plate still). This separates out more of the contaminates & water, giving you a higher proof.
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Yeah, I was focused on their description of the various fractions and their components. Were I to distill alcohol–which is not likely to happen–I’d toss that shit immediately. I’m not interested in using the early fractions as solvents or accidentally consuming the contents of a poorly labelled jar.
One other point I didn’t make earlier: if a certain sales guy I used to work with could bring home-made Balkan moonshine to every godforsaken sales conference, anybody can safely distill liquor. Damage to their career from drinking that shit is another story.
Back in my mostly forgotten chemistry days, I have to admit I always thought distillation was a pain in the ass and not particularly useful for analytical chemistry (at least not what I did).
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In Norway I saw on sale what seem to be nearly empty bottles of Rye and other spirits. Turns out that they’re flavourings. So you buy a micky of your flavouring and add your home-made spirits to it, apparently. Not sure about the legality of it, and I think this is probably because booze is so expensive there.
Everyone here is focused on the aspect of this case as it relates to home distillation, which is understandable, but this is NOT a good decision because of the legal reasoning this judge used. If this stands, it would significantly cut into the government’s ability to tax. It also represents a very new limitation of the necessary and proper clause, and the commerce clause. This judge is NOT following precedent, which he is required to do, as a district court judge. A district court can’t just toss out decades of precedent. The Supreme Court can, and they have been lately, but district courts and appeals courts cannot do that. They must follow precedent. What this judge has done is dangerous, not because it’s going to result in deaths from home distilleries (although it may do that too), but because it is a dangerous expansion of the power of district courts, and because it’s taking yet more power away from Congress. This guy, as someone pointed out above, is a Trump appointee. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find he has connections to the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.
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From a reddit discussion:
Seems like a pretty obvious attempt to tee up a challenge to the Court’s longstanding commerce clause jurisprudence. I don’t see how this opinion could possibly be in accordance with *Gonzales v. Raich, or the post-Wickard regime in general. It clearly doesn’t regulate inactivity, so NFIB v. Sebelius doesn’t come into play, nor does it regulate clearly non-economic activity, like bringing guns into school zones. Raich , which upheld a federal law banning the growing of medical marijuana in one’s own home for personal use as a valid exercise of the commerce clause, seems to be directly on point.
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The whole time I was reading the decision, I just kept shaking my head and thinking, “What the hell is this judge doing?” I mean, I know what he’s doing, but it’s mind blowing to me because the decision is so clearly outside the bounds of what a district court can do.
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