GOING BLIND FROM HOMEMADE ALCOHOL

[ДимаВеселов-ви]

As a man from a place where recreational distilling is perfectly legal, there's really not too much "professional" in it: heads(methanol, acetone and some other stuff) have lower boiling point(around 64-69° Celsius vs 78.4° for ethanol) and have a very distinct strong smell, so what you do even if you don't have thermometer is set the heat in a way that you get 1 distilled drop every 2-3 seconds and wait until it stops smelling aceton-ish. After that you can crank up the heat so you'll get about 1liter/hour(a little stream that separates into droplets) and get going. If you don't trust your nose, you can just calculate the total amount of alcohol you have in your mixture and assume that 15% of it is heads—that should eliminate all the methanol for pretty much any fermented stuff you want to distill

[DrinktheVenom]

Distillation is illegal because of taxes, no other reason.

[christiancraigen]

Informative. But where's the recipe book?

[AlleyCat]

PSA: issue is methanol evaporates at 64C vs ethanol at 78C and then water at 100C. If you distill a VERY large quantity of a fermented base like a dummy directly into individual bottles as the distillation proceeds, then the first bottle(s) will be pure methanol. That is the real danger, but we are talking industrial scale here. If instead, you discard the first part of distillation, then you eliminate the methanol. Or if you distill everything in one go before bottling, you retain the methanol but it will be distributed throughout all your bottles and will have negligible effect. TLDR: it’s not possible to get methanol poisoning if you distill a small amount of alcohol at home. All non-distilled fermented drinks (wine, beer, etc) have methanol but in tiny quantities that pose no harm.

[Chevsilverado]

One thing with distillation:

If you distil your batch into one container, and all the methanol that comes over first is collected into the same jug as all of the other ethanol and water, you have the same ratio of alcohol to methanol than if you hadn’t distilled in the first place. But the concentration of both is higher.

So, if you drink the same amount of ethanol from your distillate as you would when drinking homemade wine to get an equal amount of drunk, you will consume the same amount of methanol as well.

So drink for drink, it shouldn’t contain any more methanol.

Volume for volume it will contain more, but you’d be VERY drunk because it contains equally as much ethanol. You may drink 750ml of wine for a night but you’d drink like 1/4 of that in spirits, or less, so methanol consumption remains the same.

The danger is specifically when you take the first fraction of distillate and drink it since methanol is more volatile and comes over first, so you end up with a cup of methanol. With a very basic safety step of discarding a little bit of the first fraction your subsequent bottles of distillate will actually contain less methanol per drink than the undistilled home brew wine and beer.

Honestly unless you REALLY fuck it up and drink straight head fraction you will never go blind, because in most cases that first 750ml bottle of distillate will not even contain enough methanol to poison you if you don’t throw it out, it’s just a worst case scenario if your fermentation was exceedingly poor. I’ve heard of nasty headaches though. Kinda foolproof unless you literally have no idea what you’re doing and you mess up almost every step.

[TheSpecialJ]

What's interesting is ethanol is preferentially metabolized in the body over methanol, so most of the methanol gets peed out before it gets metabolizied if you're drinking lots of water and alcohol. But if this doesn't happen, then your body has time to create formic acid. Because the methanol comes out first when you distill, if you retain that methanol in its concentrated form, you end up with a fluid with a totally different methanol:ethanol ratio with a lot less water encouraging you to pee it out.

[Bobert]

Love the channel and absolutely agree in promoting homebrewing and pointing out that home distilling is illegal, but this information is kind of misleading: distilling normally fermented grain, juice, sugar, etc won't result in dangerous methanol concentrations. You can't really concentrate anything that wasn't there in the first place by distilling, and even the highest concentrations of methanol in mead, cider, beer, or wine aren't dangerous. The distiller's process of taking cuts and remixing/redistilling is more for making a better tasting product (with fewer hangovers) than safety.

The myth of methanol resulting from distilling comes from prohibition when the government, or other unscrupulous actors, would use wood alcohol. Either to discourage people from redistilling industrial solvent ethanol to drink, or to make a cheap liquor without understanding the dangers. As long as no one has put wood alcohol in your homebrew, any distillate won't make you blind.

If anyone is interested, r/firewater has a great pinned explanation on methanol and distilling.

[maracachucho]

Bootleggers distilled WOOD FUMES and sold that, it's why methanol is also known as wood alcohol, it has nothing to do with regular brewing.

[TheCrunchbird]

Home distillation is 100% legal in New Zealand. Methanol poisoning there is unheard of.

[nilsroesel]

It all depends on what you ferment.
If you ferment pure sugar, there is no methanol produced. As easy.
Methanol comes by the fermentation of different substances within the fermantation base...
I think it was the pectine (or however its called in english) which is usually part of peels and that stuff, what ferments into methanol.
There are even fruit wines you cant drink without destillation, because they have a too high concentration of methanol.
Oranges and other citrus fuits have a pretty high content of pectine...so yeah...you probably can get blind when fermenting those...

[AustinPierce]

It’s illegal cause they can’t TAX it. Government don’t care about your health 😂

[tom]

thank you! I always wanted to start making my own beer but was too afraid of all the rumors I heard about going blind from messing up on home made alcohol. so thanks for clearing up that misunderstanding.

[presterjack]

Methanol poisoning is real but it's not caused by homemade alcohol produced by traditional methods. Attempting to increase yields by using methylated spirits (which have added methanol) at any point in the distillation or bottling process is the usual cause. Methanol can't actually be separated from ethanol, since it's not just about boiling point.

[kuatoroespada]

This is true for the most part, regular fermentation can produce methanol at dangerous levels but as he said in perfectly controlled environments it cant....homebrew fermentation would likely produce methanol in cases of contamination by other microbes. So always sterlize everything as mentioned

[tetrabromobisphenol]

If that methanol is mixed with ethanol (as is the case with a batch distillation process) it becomes far less dangerous because the enzyme that causes all of the issues with methanol (alcohol dehydrogenase) has a 20x binding affinity for ethanol compared to methanol. Thus even up to 2% methanol concentration in a batch of ethanol will have effectively no ill effect. So all of these stories about methanol poisoning were not due to the distillation process, they were due to accidental or even deliberate contamination.

[RogerCharlamange]

There has never once been a proven case of home distillation causing blindness or anything else related to methanol. Research will show you that any instances during or after prohibition have happened due to contaminants inside the distillers, as people used to use things like old car radiators. You already posted this on your instagram months ago and didn't learn anything from all the people in the comments telling you this?

[CimmanonK]

Very educational! Thank you for the run down on that. I only learned abt methanol poisoning from some YouTube video about chemical rankings lol. Also, I love to see you're using honey from Savannah Bee Company!! I was Just thinking abt using their honey to try this out whenever I have the time 😊

[CosmicMystic]

Boglim needs this video for his homemade hooch

[drtyduckmusic]

There's actually also another method of increasing alcohol, instead of distillation you can also freeze the whole thing. When melting, the alcohol will melt quicker than the water. To be honest the only drink I know where it is used is ice bock (strong winter beer), but it should work with whine as well.

[explodaeusextremicus]

You can drink moonshine that has the foreshots from a single run in it, you'll get a splitting headache but you'll be ok. The problem is the cuts. When you collect the foreshots from a lot of runs you get relatively pure methanol. You get a bottle of methanol mixed up or misplaced, and/or use it in your cuts accidentally (as sometimes happened with amateur or unscrupulous moonshiners), you or a customer could go blind. Ethanol (the real alcohol) does interfere with methanol absorption though, so if you do start to go blind a bottle of good whiskey will prevent it.