[htag]

Methanol specifically is produced during the distillation process. The methanol vapors and ethanol vapors reside next to each other in the distillation column, making it a common impurity that is brought over in the distillation process. Great care needs to be taken to avoid collecting the methanol.

This simple fact is the greatest argument for distillation having much higher legal barriers than the simple brewing involved in beer/wine/mead.

[OkayPhysicist]

Distilling doesn't produce jack-diddly-squat. It just concentrates. Methanol is a side effect of the fermentation process, and only common with exotic carbohydrates. In a normal beer, wine, or wash, you'll find less methanol than in your morning glass of orange juice.

[throwanem]

I don't know what "exotic" means in the context of moonshine, but I've known some mountain men who weren't clever or careful about it and would ferment damn near anything - which is why I've drunk moonshine exactly once, and intend that to remain the case for the balance of my life.

Poking around the web, it seems as if making liquor at home has become popular among booze nerds. That's great and all, but I wouldn't call it moonshine, and I'd be very hesitant about how much I reasoned based on what well-informed people do today about the practices of a century ago, or indeed about the practices of today among those for whom making moonshine is more a family tradition than a hobby.

[OkayPhysicist]

If it vaguely, and I mean vaguely resembles starch or sugar, you're not getting methanol. It's substantially harder to convert long polysacharides into ethanol/methanol than it is to convert starches and simple sugars, to the point that the less informed a person is, in the off chance they succeeded in making alcohol, the less likely there's going to be substantial methanol levels.

The vast majority of moonshine stills were just churning out unaged corn whiskey from animal feed corn. There is no risk of methanol poisoning in that scenario.

[dweymouth]

Speaking technically, methanol isn't produced during distillation, it's concentrated. Since it boils at a lower point than ethanol, it disproportionately comes out in the "heads" of a distillation run. The source wine/beer/mash already has all the methanol in it, it's just it's not a problem when present in the small quantities in a non-distilled drink, alongside with a much greater amount of ethanol. (Ethanol can actually act as an antidote to methanol since your body processes it first and can then excrete much of the methanol unmetabolized)