How does bad MOONSHINE make you go BLIND?

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The Mission And Patreon
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Below you will find further details regarding the numbers necessary to get a dangerous dose of methanol. Moonshine doesn't have the same ingredient requirements as whiskey, but the numbers are still relevant to distillation as it relates to quantities of methanol:
Whiskey is essentially distilled beer. Beer (or wash) might have around 16 mg of methanol per liter. In a typical distillation run on our still, the distiller may start with 424 liters of wash, which means there would be 6.784 grams (which is 8.57 milliliters) of methanol in the full run producing 190 liters of distillate. In a spirit run, the distiller would have 424 liters of that, meaning 15.14 grams of methanol (19.13 milliliters) in the final product. If the distiller just didn’t make a heads cut, you’d still need to drink 34 liters of 143 proof whiskey to risk methanol poisoning. If you just drank the heads cut alone, and it contained ALL the methanol in the whole run, you’d still need to drink almost 2 liters.
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Our Whiskey Review Channel:

[curtishoffmann]

Disclaimer: None of the crew is truly, permanently blind through the course of the making of this video. They were all put down humanely by certified veterinarians at the end of the recording.

[mrahzzz]

Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures:

-"Blind" Richard making an old fashioned
-Brianna making any cocktail in the TikTok cocktail video

Us:
It's the same picture

[SaltExarch]

This was a hilarious and wild episode, and I loved every second of it! One correction, though. Methanol isn't actually broken down by the kidneys, but in the liver just like ethanol. Both ethanol and methanol are eventually broken down into acid by the same enzyme. Ethanol is broken down into acetic acid (the main acid in vinegar, so basically harmless to the body), whereas methanol is broken down into formic acid, which is poisonous. The reason why ethanol is the treatment for methanol poisoning is because the enzyme in your liver that breaks down both alcohols prefers to bind to ethanol first, so the methanol isn't broken down and is passed harmlessly through your system.

[nicklikethesoup]

Rex and Breanna interacting together is like a father and daughter team that love cracking jokes together. So great. Raise that Mooch!

[raw]

Anyone notice that Rex led videos have an amazing amount of shenanigans…..I love it. Keep it up. Brianna’s faceplant was hilarious, almost as funny as her bartending..

[aljescudero]

The storytelling and production value of this channel has gone trough the roof, from the times in the vault when it was only Daniel talking to a few whiskey lovers an enthusiasts til today, a full-blown sketch-like educational distillery channel, the formula is fantastic. Kuddos to the team for your hard work, one can tell is a lot...

Cheers from argentina you magnificent basterds

[Crowbars]

Since ethanol is the antidote to methanol poisoning (and methanol is quite difficult to remove completely), a small amount of methanol (between 80-860mg/L) is allowed in most distilled spirits.
Not only that, but another drug to treat methanol poisoning is called fomepizole. It works by inhibiting the conversion of methanol to formaldehyde and formic acid.
If you were to take fomepizole whilst drinking ethanol, it would prevent a hangover! Ethanol is converted to ethanal, then to acetic acid which is then burned in the krebs cycle. The build up of ethanal (acetaldehyde) is what causes most hangover symptoms. If you inhibit that then there's no, or a very mild, hangover. It would also prevent you from getting most of the calories from ethanol too, and make the effects of alcohol last way longer.
Imagine that, hangover and calorie free ethanol that gets you drunker than regular ethanol.
The only problem with fomepizole is that it only works if injected i.v. and its half-life is very short. So, you'd need a continuous drip whilst you're trying to get your drink on.

[dougmccullough]

Hysterical. Took me 3rd time through to see Rex stepping over "dead" Briana cause she mooched more than an ounce! Well done!

[Segphalt]

Another interesting thing about methanol is it can also permiate through your skin so you don't even have to drink it to have some nasty effects.

In college we had some experiments with methanol fuel. At that point a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 became part of the first aid kit.

[dirty]

I love the comedic take on all of this. It’s never annoying like a lot of chef YouTubers who are also influencers, this is the perfect balance of teaching and entertainment.

[exmcgee]

One thing your viewers should know too, is that beer and wine also contain the same amount of methanol as the foreshots of a distillation run (5 gallons of beer, wine or whiskey wash has 50ml of CH3OH), it is harmless because no one can drink enough in that form to get sick and it is in an azeotrope ; that is, diluted with water, ethanol etc.

[BrutusMaximusAurelius]

3:05 I love how Rex points in the right direction to look at, while Daniel is supposed to be blind 😂

[g-low]

36 ppl died here in 1994, when some cheap wine makers used to use ethanol to boost alcohol percentage on cheap wine. but got some methanol mixed in the barrels. nobody knows how those methanol barrels got mixed with the ethanol ones, if it was by mistake or if it was made on purpose. methanol producers have to add colour and a bitter substance to prevent this from happening.

[ericlarsen]

Brianna hold up her hand saying “I want a turn” but Rex not showing any emotion was hilarious

[adambrickley]

Brianna's prat-fall at the beginning may be the single best thing I've ever seen on this channel. 🤣

[adamw]

Unfortunately, there is a bunch of misinformation in this video.

No, methanol doesn't only come out in the first cut, aka the heads (or foreshots as they call it in Islay). And yes, the foreshots and the heads are the same thing, 2 terms coined in 2 different locations for the same cuts (heads/hearts/tails or foreshots/spirit/feints). If you visit the Inner Hebrides, and do a tour of the distilleries, especially on Islay, you will find that they use the set of terms foreshots/spirit/feints for the 3 major cuts, and not heads/hearts/tails.

Back to the crux, the idea that the methanol is found only in the heads is simply a home-distilling myth from people who don't know the chemistry that is going on. They look at the Boiling Point temperature and assume (or don't know otherwise) that is the only metric at play here, it absolutely isn't, there are a lot of different properties involved, and processes at play. For instance, methanol, due to strong hydrogen bonding, and solubility in water, is spread out across the entire distilling run, you will find it in every cut, including the tails. The heads cut should still mostly be tossed, because there are a lot of other nasty compounds that do mostly show up in the heads.

How does a distiller keep it out of your drink? They don't, they can't, it just isn't financially feasible. Even Vodka distillers, with very tall packed, or multi-plated, columns, aren't removing the methanol. Grab any bottle of liquor at your local liquor store and have it tested for methanol, and you will find methanol in it. So all that can be done is to try and minimize the total quantity of methanol produced in the first place during mashing and fermentation (methanol isn't created by fermentation, it is just produced mostly during that time by the enzymatic action of pectin methylesterase (PME), from the pectin found in plant products), and that is really only a problem for people making fruit based spirits like Brandy, Cognac, Armagnac, Slivovitz, etc. Making grain spirits, or sugar based spirits, it just isn't much of a problem because there isn't a lot of pectin in grains nor molasses, there should be none in any refined sugar product, and the pectin that is present in grains isn't easily accessible to PME enzymes as it is tied up in the bran, so for grain spirits (like whiskey), rums, vodkas, even most moonshines regardless of how they are made, it really isn't an issue regardless of how poorly the cuts are made.

So while distilling is technically about the separating of compounds, when it comes to distilling spirits, it is a lot more crude, and it is more of a continuum of dropping concentrations, than discrete lines where on one side of the line, the compound is present, and on the other the compound is gone. It just doesn't work out that way.

The stories of people going blind from drinking moonshine (which still happens today, mostly accidentally), and I don't have any actual empirical proof, but they are 100% the result of someone adulterating what comes out of the still with rubbing alcohol, isopropanol, or straight methanol, in order to increase the amount of alcohol that person can sell, and make more money. Guaranteed. It isn't the result of poor distilling practices.

Also, alcohol is first processed by the liver not the kidneys, where the metalloenzyme called Alcohol dehydrogenase acts upon it, turning methanol into formate(formic acid) and ethanol into acetate(acetic acid). But I imagine that was just a slip of the tongue.

[zippo]

I really had to laugh out loud. Hilarious. My kids looked at me like I was crazy. You guys are crazy, I love that! Laughing and learning what's better?

[rabbitspliff]

Distillation is a subtractive process though. Would you drink the wash prior to distillation? ie something akin to beer, or more pertinently fruit alcohols like wine or cider because they have a higher proportion of methanol. If you keep the total amount of ethanol constant across your consumption of the undistilled wash vs the distillate that comes off, there can't be proportionally _more_ methanol in the distillate per unit of ethanol, although distillation is a great opportunity to remove the methanol and make your booze more pleasant to drink. My understanding was that the main risk from moonshine came from unscrupulous production methods, most importantly if your still is constructed with toxic metals like lead that can be leached into the product during distillation. And then on top of that is the question, would you feel safe drinking the product that goes into the still before it's distilled? Because the answer should always be yes.

[dannyfirestine]

So when I'm distilling I should make a heads cut (or discard the first drippings) to avoid methanol? I seriously couldn't find an answer between all the stupid bits.

[whiskeywishingwell]

Go Tribe Go, another classic. LMFAO, You guys set the bar so high, others can not reach. Visiting the Whiskey vault in Texas is on my bucket list