Discussion

US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

d--b: I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.

serf: well, poisonous.normal hooch is dangerous, too.

fzeindl: In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.

briandw: [delayed]

monero-xmr: FYI you can also grow psychedelic mushrooms at home in all 50 states legally. The precursors are legal

tastyfreeze: Do be careful. Depending on the state mushrooms become illegal at different stages of production.

smackeyacky: In the modern world they don’t have to be. I’m not sure a bubbling still in every home is a great idea but they won’t be wood fired so that’s a start. You could also test alcohol cheaply these days for the poisonous alcohols.Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free

sublinear: I find this line of thinking fascinating considering how many things we do (forced to drive for basic errands, etc.) that are orders of magnitude more dangerous.Anyway, my point is that the people most at risk of poisoning themselves are those unfamiliar with the process.Also, I'm pretty sure a ton of people were doing this anyway for non-commercial purposes without realizing an unenforced federal law even existed.

InvertedRhodium: Anything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe.I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.

bobtheman: I visited Norway and was blown away by the price of alcohol. Given that the sun only comes out for a fraction of an hour in winter I struggled to believe it. At a local bar... (I think I was in trondheim?) I asked how they afforded booze? (it worked out to 15$ USD per pint), "We don't, but we do it anyways"

ghastmaster: The article is devoid of any meaningful legal language. It is important to note that this ruling applies only to the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi as the fifth circuit is the court that decided this. That said, when parties bring cases to other federal circuit courts, they may cite this case. Frequently circuit decisions can impact other district courts decisions.

mattmaroon: That’s because they adulterate it with methanol. Methanol can be derived from natural gas cheaply. I wrote a long comment above about why this isn’t a risk with home distilling.The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor. The fire codes for a distillery are very strict.

Jimmc414: The court invalidated IRC Sections 5601(a)(6) and 5178(a)(1)(B), finding they go beyond Congress’s taxation powers. The court’s reasoning was that these provisions amount to an “anti revenue provision” that prevents distilled spirits from coming into existence, since under 26 U.S.C. § 5001(b) taxation begins as soon as the spirit exists, so banning production eliminates the taxable event entirely.Here are the official docs for the caseMcNutt v. US Department of Justicehttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca5.220...

mattmaroon: That’s actually a common myth perpetuated by the American government during prohibition. The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch to blind people, then they told people they’d go blind from moonshine to discourage it.Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them. The ratio of ethanol to methanol in a distilled spirit will be approximately the same as in the wash it was distilled from. Drinking brandy you’ll get about the same ratio as if you drank the wine it was made from.You need the same amount of ethanol to get drunk regardless of how you drink it, all distilling does is get rid of that pesky water that’s in beer and wine. (That makes some other fun things like barrel aging possible.) So you’ll also get the same amount of methanol.Also fun fact: if you got methanol poisoning and went to the hospital the treatment is ethanol, because it blocks the metabolism of methanol. Methanol metabolizes into formic acid which damages the optic nerve.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.You’d have to try hard to seriously injure yourself drinking home distilled spirits. (I’ve been doing it for 15 years.) Unless you count just drinking too much, but you’d have that problem with the professional stuff too.

fsckboy: do you mean distills? decanting is just pouring carefully

storus: Given ethanol is the antidote for methanol, carry your own vodka at all times so that you can flush out any home-distilled drink safely at the cost of being more drunk.

ardit33: Awesome... time to get the moonshine flowing again!

mattmaroon: This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.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.

bsder: > The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor.This would suggest that using induction heating would be significantly safer and have the possibility of precise temperature control. Is there any reason why home distilling does/does not do this?

mattmaroon: Electric heating does reduce the risk of fire, yes, and some of us do it. (It’s also just a lot easier than a turkey fryer.) I rigged a water heater element up for this purpose.(Technically there actually isn’t temperature control in distilling, the temperature is just the boiling point of the mixture, which changes over time as the mixture changes from distillation, but you do control the heat input which effects the speed at which you distill. Tangential, but counterintuitive.)The reason most don’t is just cost/practicality. You really need to have a fair bit of liquid to get good results. Like tenish gallons (~40L). You probably can’t fit a still that big on your stovetop (and you really want to do this outside anyway) and you’d need a 240v connection to provide enough heat. Your standard American wall outlet doesn’t provide enough juice.But the standard 240v 50a you charge an EV with or, in my case, plug in your RV does. People run drier cords out a window too.

retrac: Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.

RealityVoid: Meh, home distilled spirits are everywhere in Romania. I drank many many times home distilled spirits. They are not that dangerous.

ghastmaster: I like the analysis of "necessary" and "proper" sections of this opinion. Hopefully, this ruling gets expanded to other circuits and eventually leads to the US Supreme Court ignoring stare decisis with regard to wickard v filburn and let it be thrown in the dust bin of history.

3eb7988a1663: >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 seems wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.

frankzander: Interesting one.

pseingatl: Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. Outside the compound, the locally-distilled "sid" is on offer. Both varieties have been available for a half-century with no reports of poisoning.

InvertedRhodium: Yeah. No idea why I wrote decant.

frankzander: Alcohol is always poisonous (but mixed with methanol quite a bit more poisonous ) :-)

awesomeusername: Experienced distiller here. This comment is spot on.

ghastmaster: >North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation.I find it interesting that you have this notion. I was born in 1984. The history books in school were still implying that home distillation was dangerous. "Rot gut whiskey" "bath tub gin" are phrases that continue to come to mind to this day when I think of the prohibition days.No one I have ever met in all of the different levels of society here have had any strong disdain or distrust of home brewing or distillation. By the time of my upbringing, at least, the general population in the US is content with the alcohol laws. They are not aware of how easy home brewing, wine-making, and disilling are. They are not aware of the post prohibition three tier system. They are just consumers.If your statement was about other drugs, you would be spot on. Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata. Prohibition of other drugs is a different story for cultural reasons.

nik282000: 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.

ihalip: How's your eyesight?

jandrewrogers: This doesn’t make sense. Whether or not you have methanol depends on what you are distilling from. Distillation doesn’t create methanol and many sources of ethanol contain negligible methanol.TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.

akersten: It seems to parse just fine? They create some unknown mixture of methanol/ethanol (who knows what the ratio is, who cares, like you said, depends what you're making it from) and then raise it past the boiling point of methanol, throwing away everything that comes over while still under the boiling point of ethanol. It sounds like basic distillation to me.

akersten: > This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.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.

blululu: "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.

raverbashing: YesOversimplified might be a better description but there needs to be a rule even dumb people can useSo the rule is: discard whatever comes firstIf you expect every home distiller to understand the nuances of this you're going to end up with a lot of "accidents"

3eb7988a1663: You can. I think parent is using some technicality of how distillation is not going to get you to 100.0000% purity.

mothballed: Sounds similar to the 'tax' power making it impossible to buy a tax stamp for a post 86 machine gun.