[boibombeiro]

> Toxic distilled alcohol isn't.

Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government during prohibition, right?

We know how to distill from millenniums, and selling poisonous alcohol isn't a very sustainable business model...

I remember reading an article about the success of this campaign (was one of the first of this kinda). I'm mobile, but I'm sure someone can find a post a link.

[donatj]

> Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government

Methanol poisoning is a VERY real thing. Methanol is easily accidentally produced when using a poorly calibrated still and not throwing out enough of the early product, particularly while processing alcohol made from corn where pectin helps create methanol. It’s very real and very dangerous.

The problem is ethanol (the good alcohol) laced with a small amount of methanol won’t immediately cause obvious health issues, they tend to creep up over time especially given continued consumption.

The government did however also purposely release horribly adulterated alcohol into the black market during prohibition and literally kill people, which is probably where your belief of it all being propaganda comes from.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity

- https://sciencing.com/test-alcohol-methanol-8714279.html

- https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-o...

[throwaway0a5e]

>Methanol is easily accidentally produced when using a poorly calibrated still and not throwing out enough of the early product,

Easily? Yes.

Easily done unintentionally? No way in hell.

You don't even need to calibrate anything, just throw out the first bunch of stuff that comes out of the still. There's a ~10deg hop after the methanol is done boiling during which the still almost stops producing. You just throw out everything that comes before (and during) that reduced flow.

[ZeroGravitas]

I think you might be referring to this legislative attempt to workaround tax avoidance with sometimes fatal consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol

> Denatured alcohol (also called methylated spirits, in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom; wood spirit; and denatured rectified spirit)[1] is ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage its recreational consumption. It is sometimes dyed so that it can be identified visually. Pyridine and methanol,[2] each and together, make denatured alcohol poisonous; and denatonium makes it bitter.

> In many countries, sales of alcoholic beverages are heavily taxed for revenue and public health policy purposes (see Pigovian tax). In order to avoid paying beverage taxes on alcohol that is not meant to be consumed, the alcohol must be "denatured", or treated with added chemicals to make it unpalatable. Its composition is tightly defined by government regulations in countries that tax alcoholic beverages.

[nicoburns]

> Do you realize this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda from the government, right?

Eh, I'm not sure about that. There are stories in the newspaper every few years about a corner stop selling cheap bootleg alcohol that has caused someone to go blind (or die) because it contained too much methanol. I for one am quite glad that alcohol production is well regulated.

[seanwilson]

> There are stories in the newspaper every few years about a corner stop selling cheap bootleg alcohol that has caused someone to go blind (or die) because it contained too much methanol. I for one am quite glad that alcohol production is well regulated.

Can you find a case of methanol poisoning for beer or wine brewing where the maker hasn't deliberately added in something extra that contains methanol (e.g. from fluids sold for industrial use)?

I find when the news reports stories like this, they bury in the story where the methanol poisoning came from so the general public are led to believe that all alcohol brewing is incredibly dangerous, including making non-distilled drinks yourself.

For example, the first link from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_inc... is https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-06/grappa-poison-william...:

"Man pleads not guilty to manslaughter and grievous bodily harm following home brew tragedy...Mr Meredith said Lynam bought methanol to use as industrial weed killer and confused it with ethanol when the home brew was made."

[nicoburns]

I haven't researched this, but all the cases I remember were vodka or a similar spirit. It may well have been because someone was adding something containing methanol.

[lowkey]

> Do you realize this idea of poison alcohol was propaganda from the government, right?

Do you realize that:

> During prohibition, the US Govt added poison to industrial alcohol to discourage consumption. People continued to drink it, so the government added more and they killed 10,000 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...

[GordonS]

Purely anecdotal, but my brother has a small (illicit) still and has walked me through the process - it's fairly simple, and neither of us can figure out how these methanol poisoning cases could happen by accident.

Simply, the "heads" (which are high in methanol) come out of the still first, so it's easy to remove them.

In addition, methanol test strips are cheap and easy to use.

[nicoburns]

I think it's probably as simple as people not caring and being careless.

[a2tech]

Discarding the heads is obviously best practices, but from discussions with serious scientifically minded distillers (ie chemists that enjoy brewing gin and artisanal vodka at home) the amount of methanol contained in the heads of your home distillation is hardly enough to harm you. In the worst cases if you consumed a significant volume it might give you a harsh headache (and this would be a truly large amount). If you were to collect the heads from several batches and drank that all in one go, you could probably make yourself sick.

Now say you're a shady corner store owner and you take some denatured alcohol or other spirits and dump it into some cheap vodka and sell it under the table as 'moonshine' or something else to make a quick buck...yeah you're going to hurt people. And not just a little. You could easily kill someone that way, or permanently damage them. But at home with your own still? You're way more likely to start a fire than you are to kill someone with your distillate. Unless you start cutting your output with other not-for-consumption spirits.

[GordonS]

Aside from removing the heads to avoid death and blindness, it's also done for flavour and aroma - they have a nasty, "chemical/solvent" smell (and I'd assume taste).

[Swannie]

Right, it's not only the methanol that you want to discard, there's acetone, and other nasties too.

[thathndude]

But you could also simply not partake right?

If I’m very sensitive to food borne illness concerns, maybe I make the choice to go to a grocery store with vacuum sealed product, versus buying at a farmers market?

Similarly, folks who want “safe” booze can buy the bottled stuff from the big boys, not the corner store swill.

Of course, the weakness in this position is that the corner store swill is often substantially cheaper, and thus disproportionately affects low income communities.

No good answers. I’m not a smoker. So I have no dog in this fight. But I can’t help but read this article with a degree of schaddenfreude and frustration. The gov’t is so poor at executing sometimes, it’s astounding.

[beerandt]

Not just the idea/ propaganda, but the govt mandate that methanol be added to ethanol to make denatured spirits, aka the "poison alcohol".

It was literally a government created problem, with the same government claiming to be the only layer of security protecting John Q Public from this super dangerous product.

Prohibition is a case study in so many different ways of how to badly govern with the best intentions.

[pmarreck]

> this ideia of poison alcohol was propaganda done by the government during prohibition

imagine believing propaganda about propaganda.

congrats, man, you've come full-circle. methanol poisoning is very real, and methanol is definitely present in the "heads" of distillations (speaking as someone who's done this), and since there isn't a clear delineation between what is the "head" and what is the "body", it's entirely too easy (especially if you don't want to waste any of the good stuff) to accidentally include too much methanol in your distillation... which is exactly why alcohol is regulated

[throwaway0a5e]

> and since there isn't a clear delineation between what is the "head" and what is the "body"

At any appreciable scale you get a reduced flow/pause in output as the mixture finishes boiling off the methanol and has to increase in temp before boiling the ethanol. It's a 10+ degree temp change so it's not instant. You need to be creating a small batch on a heat source that's way overkill to not have a defined difference.

[bigbillheck]

> We know how to distill from millenniums,

Only in the sense that we've had computers for millennia (i.e. the one before 2000 and the one after).

[gbronner]

Jamaica Ginger and the Jake Walk. A lot of people were crippled by bad booze adulterated with other bad things

[yebyen]

> We know how to distill from millenniums

I'm reminded of that XKCD where every day, 10000 people are learning for the first time something that everybody knows...

No person alive today has known how to distill alcohol safe for human consumption for longer than about 100 years. The median experience among current distillers will be substantially lower than that age.