People frequently get blind or just die from home made booze when distilling and not checking for methyl alcohol. Quite common on poor parts of the world but also ie eastern Europe and russia.
Misinformation. Unless you happen to own a GCMS you don't check for methanol. Rather you discard the heads and the tails from a fractioning still because that's where stuff that isn't ethanol comes out. In the modern era you'd use a digital thermometer for this task.
Someone suffering methanol poisoning from DIY distillation is equivalent to someone landing in the hospital after failing to cook his chicken all the way through. It's simple incompetence, likely due either to blatant disregard for safety or else to attempting to wing something based on only the most topical of knowledge.
Isn't the remedy for methanol ingestion... Ethanol? Just keep drinking?
I have two distillers and I've never distilled alcohol. I do distill water in my eletric one. I turn it on and leave the condenser part off until bubbles form, I blow the steam off to ensure it steams again, place the top on, set the timer for 3 hours and shut it off then. The pre-boil ostensibly let's the petroleum and the like escape, and the stopping before dry prevents anything with a higher phase temp than water from distilling.
I use it for coffee machine, kettle, and ice machine, just to cut down on maintenance.
Ten years ago I bought 3 copper five gallon distillers, and gave two to my in-laws and kept one for myself. I tried to distill water in it but it was not coming out clean, so I packed it away till I had time to use it outside on a propane burner after purging it with alcohol or some non-copper eating acid.
> Rather you discard the heads and the tails from a fractioning still because that's where stuff that isn't ethanol comes out.
This is also incorrect. It comes out throughout the distillation process, with a higher % concentration in the tails, but an over all reduced volume due to lower % distillate.
> Someone suffering methanol poisoning from DIY distillation is equivalent to someone landing in the hospital after failing to cook his chicken all the way through.
It's more like taking raw packs of chicken and rubbing your eyes. That has to be intentional.
This gets repeated a lot but doesn't actually stand up to any scrutiny.
If you go and look, you will find that cases of blindness are caused not by "improper" distillation, but rather by the adulteration of the finished product- that is, extra methanol being added after the fact.
If you can find a verifiable case of a person going blind from home distillation, I would be interested to see it.
Someone suffering methanol poisoning from DIY distillation is equivalent to someone landing in the hospital after failing to cook his chicken all the way through. It's simple incompetence, likely due either to blatant disregard for safety or else to attempting to wing something based on only the most topical of knowledge.