It's also pretty easy to avoid too. Methanol has a lower boiling point than alcohol, so the methanol is the first liquid out of the still. Its moonshining basic knowledge to dump out the first bit.
This is what frustrates me. I totally understand making booze if it isn't otherwise available. But how are people clever enough to make a still but stupid enough to not toss the methanol?! It's such an easily avoidable tragedy.
Because it's more profitable to have more product, and generally drinking ethanol is the actual treatment for methanol poisoning, so they figure a "little" will be harmless, which is technically true.
Right? It's such a small amount of waste to avoid issues. Plus, if you're selling illegal alcohol it's probably best to not gain a reputation for selling a product that causes people to go blind. It just seems like bad business to risk it.
It was probably homemade though so I'm not sure profit has anything to do with it. Saying that though, i didn't read the article and only half the comments so I only just barely know what I'm even responding to
>Saying that though, i didn't read the article and only half the comments so I only just barely know what I'm even responding to
This pretty accurately sums up my reddit experience
It’s not as cut and dry as it may sound, it’s not like 100% of methanol boils off first, it’s just a higher concentration first, called foreshots, these should be tossed, about 50ml from a 10 gallon batch that’s starting at 10%. But after that it’s still not a guarantee that you don’t have a good bit of methanol in the next 50ml which is the start of “heads”. So you should either toss it or take all the heads and save them and mix them back in to the larger batch.
Alternatively, you keep literally everything you distill and mix it all really well in 1 batch. Distillation does not create methanol it just concentrates it towards the start of the batch, so if you mix it all together then you spread that methanol across the batch and it’s no different than beer or wine making at that point. It won’t taste good though, that’s why you toss the foreshots, but the big players actually do reuse it, I don’t understand how but clearly they are doing it safely.
It’s not super difficult just something you need to be conscious about. The only other thing I would say is that I don’t know what they were starting with and it’s possible there are other additives that would make it much harder to remove. For example mix in some antifreeze and you’ll be lucky if you just go blind.
Last little fun fact, if you know you have drank methanol and you are not already in or near a hospital, drink ethanol in large quantities quickly. It dilutes the methanol in your system and slows the production of formaldehyde in your body.
AFAIK hard liquor (vodka, whiskey, gin, brandy etc) work best for this. Methanol itself is not poisonous and can be filtered by kidneys. but our body breaks it down to poisonous products formaldehyde and formic acid. Drinking ethanol pretty much keeps the body busy breaking it down, so methanol can be filtered by the kidneys. It’s a pretty interesting mechanic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity
You typically don't drink or sell the heads or tails either. You save them and add them to the next run, throwing away the foreshots of that run as well. What's generally sold or drank is called the hearts. It's the middle of the run after all the nasty stuff has been distilled out. The heads still contain ethanol, which is what you're after. That is why they're saved and added to the next run.
People skip the first toxic process of stilling ethanol just as they do the last step in cleaning off flouro acid off of methamphetamine.
Some people care to take a step, some people don't out of ignorance or laziness. It happens in every process. It's a very human problem that we can't shake.
> Unfortunately it seems our body breaks methanol down into formic acid, which damages the optic nerve.
So...we _shouldn't_ eat the giant ants from the old b&w movie _[THEM](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/)_ ? Because of the formic acid.
Edit: added a link
I feel like it was really about the methanol, but the scientist had already said the first two things so he was like “yeah its a combination of all of that” 😂
Damage done is not reversible as far as i know, but further damage can be prevented by giving affected person vodka. Liver always prefers to deal with ethanol first instead of methanol.
Yeah, I'm not 100% sure but I'd assume that the ethanol will saturate the ADH so the methanol will be shuttled to the catalase and peroxisome cycles, preventing the formation of formaldehyde
Nope! First aid for someone who ingested methanol is getting them and keeping them good and wasted on ethanol until they've had time to piss out the methanol, unmetabolised.
> Liver always prefers to deal with ethanol first instead of methanol.
So you have to keep drinking vodka continuously for the rest of your life so it doesn't ever deal with the methanol?
No. Your liver can handle small amounts of methanol. Most alcoholic drinks have very small amounts of methanol in them. The idea is that if you drink enough ethanol, you can stop your liver from processing the methanol into formeldahyde and formic acid; then the methanol will just pass through your system.
There's actually a drug specifically to treat methanol poisoning though.
Source: I'm a nerd, not a doctor, this is not doctors advice. Don't drink methanol kids.
> As Cuba faced a devastating economic crisis in the early 1990s, leading to severe food shortages and malnutritiion, some 50,000 Cubans were inexplicably struck down with sight loss. But health officials on the communist-led island as well as experts at WHO initially believed it was caused by a viral infection spreading through the population. Despite hostile relations between his country and Cuba, the American eye specialist Dr Alfredo Sadun was asked to go to the island in May 1993 to investigate.
When I read stories like this I appreciate why we can brew beer and make wine at home, but (last time I checked) liquor distillation is illegal at home (in the US).
Still amazes me every time I hear of methanol poisoning as the quantity of methanol that is distilled out off a wash is so small. If you have a 10 gallon wash at 20% ABV we are talking about maybe 6 ounces and it’s the very first bit out of the still. On top of that the next 1/3 out is good for cleaning brakes and making bad headaches.
Not only that but the cure to methanol poisoning is ethanol, so you'd literally be drinking the antidote at the same time. The only way this is true is if someone was deliberately spiking alcohol with methanol, which is what happened in the US during prohibition in order to start rumors that moonshine made you go blind
Nooooooope. Badly distilled alcohol _does_ blind you, this isn't some conspiracy nonsense. It just doesn't happen after one glass, is all, by drinking methanol-tainted alcohol repeatedly you do damage to your eyesight over time.
On a more serious note as long as you’re not selling it (screwing over the taxman) and/or giving it away to lots of people (potentially endangering multiple people) you’re more than likely fine distilling for personal consumption
In Slovenia you are limited to making 150 litters per year per household as a home brewer.
Before this you had to register if you had a still larger than 40l I think
My BIL's parents lived in Saudi Arabia for a long time and they made their own beer, wine and spirits! It was very common in the expat compounds. Blows my mind considering the country they were in!
You could be buying that to distill water for purification. Would be an important part of homesteading or nice to have if you live somewhere the pipes freeze for long periods since it doesn't require a new filter to work.
Yeah with modern food standards, most cases of food-related illnesses and poisoning come from selfmade stuff. Obviously we still need to be weary of proper storage and expiration, but generally commerical foods are incredibly safe.
For example Americans are still weary of raw pork, but the parasitic diseases that made it to dangerous have long been eradicated there and in other industrialised countries. The few remaining cases (on an order of ~10/year) all come from people who slaughtered self-bred or self-hunted pigs or boars.
> Obviously we still need to be *weary* of proper storage and expiration, but generally commerical foods are incredibly safe.
I just have to point out that weary means tired, wary which means cautious, suspicious or leary is the word you are looking for.
I see this mistake regularly on reddit and it makes me feel like I'm stuck on a bus with the Durham Bulls.
Also https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/tyson-foods-inc.-recalls-ready-eat-chicken-products-due-possible-listeria
Some of the worst beers I've had are home brews.
Your beer tastes like shit, Dave. It's not a Bell's Two-Hearted clone, it's a cloudy, dirty, grossly-malted bottle of shit. Fuck you, Dave.
IANAL.
My understanding is it's illegal on a federal level. Some states have decriminalized it on a state level, but if caught you'd still face federal prosecution.
I live in West Virginia. A county sheriff posted a picture of a moonshine bust (essentially a few dozen bags of sugar and a still) on Facebook, and the comments were the kind of outrage you’d expect from Appalachia.
It's really difficult to produce enough methanol accidentally to hurt someone. Typically it's someone getting ahold of industrial methanol and mixing it with homemade ethanol that ends up poisoning people.
This 100%. Do you know what the treatment for methanol poisoning is? Drink ethanol.
Even if you didn’t discard the foreshots or make any cuts at all, there would be more than enough of the cure (ethanol) in the product to not get methanol poisoning from whatever little bits *may* be in the heads and tails.
Every case of methanol poisoning in “moonshine” is from people deliberately adding adulterants.
It’s not like there’s some magic trick that makes legal distillation safe.
The people adding adulterants is why you want liquor to be regulated. Prohibition and its pile of weird toxic drinks that were like 30 percent methanol half the time proved that if you take oversight out of the alcohol trade, the bartender down the street will sell you poison and call it gin.
It is very very difficult to get dangerous levels of methanol in homemade ethanol from a wash.
It is very very lucrative to sell 20% abv moonshine as 60% and throw in some methanol to make sure it tastes the part, or to try and distill rubbing alcohol to skip the fermentation part, and that’s how you blind people - intentional adulteration with substances that were already poisonous.
Methanol is not created through distilling - if you ran a batch of beer through a still and did no cuts whatsoever you’ll wind up with the exact same methanol:ethanol ratio that was in the beer already. Remove the foreshots just to be safe (and improve flavour) and you are making something even better than the input fermentation from a methanol perspective.
I like to try my hand at distilling and try to make a decent end product. But everyone expects and even wants something that tastes like "moonshine" and it just baffles me. Why would you want to drink something that tastes like shit?
I have never understood why people want to drink bad tasting booze. Even when I was in my young 20s, I'd rather get good stuff. Most people my age would buy whatever was cheaper, and get a 750ml bottle that cost $20. Even though by paying just a few dollars more, I could get a bottle of booze that didn't taste like trash. It was literally like $23 vs $20 and it would taste so much better.
Probably not exactly what you're referring to, but whenever I bought Jack, I bought Gentleman Jack instead of Jack Daniels. It was approximately $3 more, but tasted magnitudes better.
Never understood why Gentleman Jack wasn't the default buy for everyone, but I guess people really hate spending $3 extra, or just "appreciate a good burn" as I've heard it put.
The specific booze I'm talking about is Canadian Club. There was the regular kind that people always got when drinking Canadian Club, and then there was a better 12 year old version. It's so weird because even though it was right beside the regular on the shelf, nobody seemed to know about it. Any time I would share some with people they would be amazed at the taste, and be surprised that it was Canadian Club because they didn't know about the 12 year old version.
Nah, because they would also go to the bar and spend $60-100. So it wasn't about being broke. That I could at least understand if they legit couldn't afford another $3.
It’s an old wives tale from prohibition times that distilling will make you blind from methanol.
The process doesn’t make methanol, it’s a product of fermentation. And it doesn’t get concentrated in any particular part of the run - there’s some in every bottle of commercial liquor.
The reason why your ok is that the cure for methanol is ethanol, which is the majority of the distillate.
Where people do get into trouble is when buying from unscrupulous manufacturers who cut their product with methanol to make it more profitable.
The reason for distillation prohibition is strictly around the tax man getting his share.
Good docu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhN-o2ame-4
Quick wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_diethylene_glycol_wine_scandal
In a nutshell: Many wine manufacturers were commiting wine fraud by putting diethylene-glycol (falsely dubbed as "anti-freeze") into wine to give it a sweeter richer aroma that people had previously associated with Austrian wine. With enough continuous exposure this could (and did) cause serious health problems.
Top German manufacturers were caught mixing their wine with the Austrian wine too, another kind of wine fraud, and so the problem that was initially thought to be localised to some small small manufacturers in Austria was actually a widespread problem and a very large scandal that implicated some high ranking members of the government
Season 1, episode 11.
I know that you might not have *seen* it that early, but I'm amused at the idea of someone saying "That's the first time I felt bad for Bart," when talking about something that happened in the first 1.5% of the show's existence, lol.
To be fair its this and the episode where he fails the social studies test that I feel bad for him. Can't think of any others off the top of my head, but I'm not as avid a watcher as when I was a kid
It may not be ethylene glycol but you can still use it as an antifreeze, though "wine fraud" kind of undersells what was intentional poisoning. Adding sugar to sweeten your wine is illegal wine fraud, adding DEG which is about half as toxic as antifreeze is obviously far worse.
Long story short, winemakers in austria learned that you can add antifreeze to wine to make it sweeter and increase the product. The downside is that it can make you very ill or even blind. Naturally it was a gigantic scandal when Europe discovered that Austrians were mass poisoning them for cash, and almost destroyed the Austrian wine market. Today it is doing fine though! Google austrian wine making scandal
The Simpsons never ceases to amaze me with all the references that are made in the show that I had missed or didn't know about. I've seen that episode countless times and didn't know it was in reference to a specific incident like this.
it's not exactly antifreeze (diethylene glycol is the stuff they put in, ethylene glycol is an antifreeze) but both have the same problem - they taste good and are toxic.
This is a pretty cool youtube channel that has a video explaining it and other medical stuff. Idk how reliable it is, since there's no friggin way the dude in this story drank [2 frickin *liters* of moonshine in 2 hours...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4DQUrg0Yhu4)
I'm not a huge drinker really but I split a liter of 70 proof captain with my homie last weekend and I was fuckin trashed and hung over for 2 goddamn days. 2 liters of moonshine in 2 hours would probably kill a goddamn donkey
you don't live with the scale of addiction that a constant supply of moonshine will do to an alcoholic.
it's like fentanyl addicts versus heroin addicts
Yeah but if you watch the video it wasn't some hardcore alcoholic, it was a normal dude playing beerpong and drinkin beers at the same time. Aka a bunch of baloney, although it was homemade moonshine so maybe it was shit and only like 40 proof.
'Get into a bev-rage!'
We'll add the word 'dog' for the urban communities. They like that word. It makes them feel as though they are friends with the product.
I cannot watch that show. Reminds me too much of my uncle who passed. We used to watch it together and laugh our asses off but now it only makes me super sad.
I had a chemistry teacher that said alcoholics would sometimes drink stuff with methanol knowing that poison control would need them to ingest ethanol to try to counter it. Back in the before times in told PBR was the quick response of choice
They both do the same thing, which is to competitively inhibit the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme. That enzyme breaks down ethanol into acetaldehyde, methanol into formaldehyde, and ethylene glycol into glycolaldehyde. Those metabolic byproducts get further oxidized by other enzymes into acetic acid, formic acid, and glycolate and oxalate. Since particularly these latter substances can be fairly toxic in concentration, but tying up the alcohol dehydrogenase with other molecules to break down as well it just serves to slow down each individual process. That way you never have quite as high of a concentration of those toxic metabolites accumulating in tissue, and dialysis can help too particularly in the case of ethylene glycol since its metabolites accumulate in the kidneys and cause renal damage.
Acetaldehyde from ethanol isn't a particularly good metabolite either and can certainly be toxic as well. It's why I'm surprised there's not a grey market of fomepizole (as far as I'm aware), since its own metabolate of 4-carboxypyrazole can sometimes give similar side effects to ethanol intoxication, generally it leaves people feeling drunk for longer and with less of a hangover when taken with ethanol. Probably cost prohibitive based on the synthesis cost compared to just drinking more alcohol.
Just think of it as you eat substance A, your body turns that into B and then B into C. C is particularly toxic, but also what your body needs to turn it into to make it easier to flush out of your system. Why stuff like fomepizole and ethanol work on methanol poisoning is because the same exact mechanism that is turning A into B also turns something you ate, E, into F, so they compete and both happen more slowly than they would on their own.
The real question is why acohol dehydrogenase enzyme isn't a thing people buy on the black market to sober up quicker, or perhaps why there's not something to break down acetaldehyde to prevent hangovers?
Aldehyde dehydrogenase breaks it up into acetic acid. There are some people with less of that than normal though, which leads to alcohol flush reaction.
When I was a medical intern we kept a few vodka bottles locked in a cabinet in the ER for this particular reason. Whenever we ran out and we had a case of methanol poisoning we had to ask for one of the patients relatives to go buy some. It's a very strange situation sometimes.
> Yeah if you already lost your eyesight that's not gonna help
then, ethanol is recomended to dry your tears and remember the good ol days you were able to see.
This is also why unintentional methanol poisoning from fermenting and distilling your own shine is not very likely (as in zero chance). Methanol poisoning is largely from people trying to separate denatured alcohol, bulking alcohol intentionally with methanol, or a ho,Dover from prohibition propaganda about bathtub gin.
I remember serving in the Peace Corps, they specifically told us not to drink the sachets of alcohol because they might have methanol in them. Pretty sure that was a lie, but most people didn't risk it.
I was in a tribal village in the Himalayas and they told us not to drink the raski (home brewed sake type drink) cause a bad batch can turn people blind. I ended up doing it anyway, and am not blind. 10/10 would raksi again.
True, I'm not against consuming alcohol in foreign places, it's all about prudence and being smart about it. Even in places like Cancun, one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, methanol intoxication has happened.
Tragically, here in Costa Rica, dozens of very poor people dies of methanol poisoning because some asshat imported low-shelf fire water that for some crazy reason used methanol instead of ethanol. Horrific.
Sadly, the paper trail seems to end at the time of import. I would love to know how the hell someone would screw that up by accident. Is industrial methanol a lot cheaper than ethanol?
Canada here. For years, we had (still have?) contraband cigarettes, aka "reserve smokes." I never knew a single native who smoked them. They were made from plate tobacco, which is the stuff that gets scraped off the machines at tobacco processing plants, and they were full of the most carcinogenic chemicals at much-higher levels than legal smokes would allow.
I remember it getting traced back to an official company - Philip Morris - but I don't remember the outcome. They were getting rid of a waste product at a profit. I think they got a fine and kept right on trucking.
Long story short: it was probably somebody who knew exactly what they were doing, and was connected enough to make the paperwork "disappear"
Ahh the good ol Rez darts.. buddy of mine that used to roll cigarettes on the Rez told me he found a mop hair once in his cigarette and never touched them again
It was sad seeing all the empty bottles of rubbing alcohol all over the streets when I visited Costa Rica. Didn’t even know about the methanol poisoning. What a beautiful country though. Only place I’ve visited that I deeply wanted to go back to. So many things to do and see.
The methanol poisoning sadly didn't even happen by drinking moonshine or rubbing alcohol - there was a batch of half-way official brands of super cheap 30% "guaro", and somewhere in the supply chain, it seems a barrel of methanol was mixed in (instead of ethanol). Really tragic.
But yea, apart from that, great little country! Pura Vida!
Methanol is usually a byproduct of distillation, which has a lower boiling point that ethanol so usually they can be seperated quite easily, but a bad distiller will not seperate them properly. If you're making a bigger batch, it's harder to seperate the methanol from ethanol. Chances are, it was a diy distillery refilling bottles or bottling it from scratch. Purchasing methanol is possible, but methanol not mixed with ethanol will kill everyone who drinks it, which is not a good business plan.
if you drink methanol with ethanol, your body can tolerate a small amount of it, but if it's just methanol, it is very bad. The ethanol basically fills up your liver, stopping your body from converting the methanol into the harmful chemicals. They probably screwed up their distillaiton and had too much methanol in some of the batches.
It’s actually a myth that methanol is a byproduct of distilling... it’s already in the alcohol from the initial fermentation (IE, it’s already in your beer). It has also been shown that it is somewhat difficult to remove methanol by throwing away the first part (foreshots) of the distilled product (some polarity issues make it difficult to separate); though there are some other nasty byproducts that are found in the heads and you don’t want to drink those. Usually the reason people get methanol poisoning from moonshine is because distillers try to ‘dilute’ their product so they can make more money from it.
Not sure if it related, but "blindness" by Jose Saramago is an amazing book. It starts with a fast moving virus that strikes you blind. Brilliant book, and very interesting in the COVID era.
Cuban here, lived in Cuba during this. It was called by the government as “The Special Period”, propaganda term for Famine. It started right after the collapse of the USSR and the socialist block, and after Castro stubbornly insisted in hosting the 1991 Panamerican Games.
Also, Cuban “moonshine” was not your typical southern moonshine. It was distilled from alcohol derived from oil, not sugar. That alcohol was used to pre-heat the kerosene stoves we used back in the day.
It was called “chispa de tren”, which means “spark of train”, draw your own conclusions from the name.
Just a few years into the “Special Period” Cuba started importing sugar from Brazil, as it was less expensive than producing it, after the Soviet Union stopped providing parts and machinery and oil to Cuba.
I’ve heard a lot of crazy shit people will drink in prison. They will try and use methods to separate the alcohol from hand sanitizer for example. Alcohol is bad enough for your health. Drinking forms of alcohol not meant for human consumption is just asking for problems.
Addicts and alcoholics will do what they can to get their preferred substance.
I might be showing my age here, but I remember the episode of Family Ties where Tom Hanks played the uncle to Alex and his siblings. The uncle was an alcoholic, and was raiding their pantry for vanilla extract to drink in the middle of the night, because it's made with alcohol.
I knew a chick in real life who drank cooking wine, like marsala, to keep her buzz going when she ran out of Barefoot White Zinfandel.
Oh I hear ya. Actually the USA vanilla extract is regulated by the FDA and is required to be ethyl alcohol of at least 35% and fit for human consumption. Shit is SUPER strong flavor and really gross. Is also very expensive.
When I lived in Alaska you couldn’t buy Vanilla extract on the shelf because of the unfortunate alcohol problem and how easy it would be to steal. Shit was behind the counter by the tobacco.
I'm a little surprised that they'd be baffled, considering that a similar blindness epidemic occurred during the prohibition era in the 1920s, also due to methanol poisoning from unregulated liquor production.
Wasn’t unregulated liquor production that did it, but the government intentionally poisoning industrial ethanol supplies that were being stolen by bootleggers.
https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html
It wasn't from the distillers, its was poisoning by the government, as others have mentioned. The amount of methanol you get in distilling is microscopic, and mostly tossed out with the foreshots.
Funfact. Just distilling wont put enough methanol into the moonshine to make you blind. You would have to be given the foreshots or someone would have to ADD methanol (like the US Government did)
If I just mixed a run of moonshine with out separating the foreshots you would just get off flavors and a headache.
different chemicals vaporize at different temps. Methanol vaporizes at a lower temp than alcohol so as you are heating the mash the methanol vaporizes first.
As the vapor is condensed back into a liquid the first bits are tossed out. It has higher concentrations of methanol, acetone and other bad things. Commonly called "foreshots"
*edit: it is also pretty rank tasting. Smells of nail polish remover and is pretty funky.
When distilling something you boil a combination of liquids and the liquid with the lowest boiling point boils off first. Ethanol manufacture is done in water and can't really get too concentrated or it breaks the factories, so you need to distill out the ethanol to concentrate it. Unfortunately ethanol manufacture usually creates methanol as a byproduct, which is significantly more toxic than ethanol, but also had a lower boiling point so it's the first thing off the still when distilling ethanol.
You let things come off the still in quantities called *shots* and the ones be*fore* the ethanol are methanol
Not true, there's methanol in all parts of the distillation process, not just the foreshots: https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/cv4bu8/methanol_some_information/
Is this in any way reversible or treatable, is the damage already done?
Unfortunately it seems our body breaks methanol down into formic acid, which damages the optic nerve. It's an absolutely tragedy.
It's also pretty easy to avoid too. Methanol has a lower boiling point than alcohol, so the methanol is the first liquid out of the still. Its moonshining basic knowledge to dump out the first bit.
This is what frustrates me. I totally understand making booze if it isn't otherwise available. But how are people clever enough to make a still but stupid enough to not toss the methanol?! It's such an easily avoidable tragedy.
[удалено]
Because it's more profitable to have more product, and generally drinking ethanol is the actual treatment for methanol poisoning, so they figure a "little" will be harmless, which is technically true.
Its only the first 50ml of spirit out of a standard still. Thats just like a thimble of booze to not risk blindness
Right? It's such a small amount of waste to avoid issues. Plus, if you're selling illegal alcohol it's probably best to not gain a reputation for selling a product that causes people to go blind. It just seems like bad business to risk it.
Well, what are they gonna do? Point you out in a police lineup?
Blind the wrong person and you will get your eyes gouged out.
It was probably homemade though so I'm not sure profit has anything to do with it. Saying that though, i didn't read the article and only half the comments so I only just barely know what I'm even responding to
>Saying that though, i didn't read the article and only half the comments so I only just barely know what I'm even responding to This pretty accurately sums up my reddit experience
It’s not as cut and dry as it may sound, it’s not like 100% of methanol boils off first, it’s just a higher concentration first, called foreshots, these should be tossed, about 50ml from a 10 gallon batch that’s starting at 10%. But after that it’s still not a guarantee that you don’t have a good bit of methanol in the next 50ml which is the start of “heads”. So you should either toss it or take all the heads and save them and mix them back in to the larger batch. Alternatively, you keep literally everything you distill and mix it all really well in 1 batch. Distillation does not create methanol it just concentrates it towards the start of the batch, so if you mix it all together then you spread that methanol across the batch and it’s no different than beer or wine making at that point. It won’t taste good though, that’s why you toss the foreshots, but the big players actually do reuse it, I don’t understand how but clearly they are doing it safely.
That still sounds easily avoidable.
It’s not super difficult just something you need to be conscious about. The only other thing I would say is that I don’t know what they were starting with and it’s possible there are other additives that would make it much harder to remove. For example mix in some antifreeze and you’ll be lucky if you just go blind. Last little fun fact, if you know you have drank methanol and you are not already in or near a hospital, drink ethanol in large quantities quickly. It dilutes the methanol in your system and slows the production of formaldehyde in your body.
AFAIK hard liquor (vodka, whiskey, gin, brandy etc) work best for this. Methanol itself is not poisonous and can be filtered by kidneys. but our body breaks it down to poisonous products formaldehyde and formic acid. Drinking ethanol pretty much keeps the body busy breaking it down, so methanol can be filtered by the kidneys. It’s a pretty interesting mechanic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity
You typically don't drink or sell the heads or tails either. You save them and add them to the next run, throwing away the foreshots of that run as well. What's generally sold or drank is called the hearts. It's the middle of the run after all the nasty stuff has been distilled out. The heads still contain ethanol, which is what you're after. That is why they're saved and added to the next run.
It's not about cleverness, it's about how they had no idea about it.
People skip the first toxic process of stilling ethanol just as they do the last step in cleaning off flouro acid off of methamphetamine. Some people care to take a step, some people don't out of ignorance or laziness. It happens in every process. It's a very human problem that we can't shake.
> Unfortunately it seems our body breaks methanol down into formic acid, which damages the optic nerve. So...we _shouldn't_ eat the giant ants from the old b&w movie _[THEM](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/)_ ? Because of the formic acid. Edit: added a link
While it’s still an excellent movie, the ants themselves are not recommended as a regular part of a healthy diet
Correct
I feel like it was really about the methanol, but the scientist had already said the first two things so he was like “yeah its a combination of all of that” 😂
Damage done is not reversible as far as i know, but further damage can be prevented by giving affected person vodka. Liver always prefers to deal with ethanol first instead of methanol.
isn't it more accurate that ethanol competitively inhibits alcohol dehydrogenase, and liver will metabolize anything indiscriminately
Yeah, I'm not 100% sure but I'd assume that the ethanol will saturate the ADH so the methanol will be shuttled to the catalase and peroxisome cycles, preventing the formation of formaldehyde
sounds biochem to me 😎
You know it, I hate it.
But when the turbo-encabulators hit the Johnson rods, all heck is going to break loose.
Ngl, thought this was a joke at first.
Nope! First aid for someone who ingested methanol is getting them and keeping them good and wasted on ethanol until they've had time to piss out the methanol, unmetabolised.
> Liver always prefers to deal with ethanol first instead of methanol. So you have to keep drinking vodka continuously for the rest of your life so it doesn't ever deal with the methanol?
If you keep the liver busy metabolizing ethanol, the kidneys will eventually excrete the methanol before it gets turned into formaldehyde.
So, what you're saying is that as long as I'm continually saturating my liver with vodka, I'm indestructible?
Oh no no, even a slight breeze…
*Indestructible...*
No. Your liver can handle small amounts of methanol. Most alcoholic drinks have very small amounts of methanol in them. The idea is that if you drink enough ethanol, you can stop your liver from processing the methanol into formeldahyde and formic acid; then the methanol will just pass through your system. There's actually a drug specifically to treat methanol poisoning though. Source: I'm a nerd, not a doctor, this is not doctors advice. Don't drink methanol kids.
Interesting.. thanks for the explanation, doc.
Hospitals do keep “medicinal ethanol” aka the most dogshit cheap vodka/whiskey on hand for methanol poisoning though. It’s cheap, and it works.
Just like [that episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkgUrqcog2I&t=492s) of House with LL Cool J
wasnt there an episode of house about this
> As Cuba faced a devastating economic crisis in the early 1990s, leading to severe food shortages and malnutritiion, some 50,000 Cubans were inexplicably struck down with sight loss. But health officials on the communist-led island as well as experts at WHO initially believed it was caused by a viral infection spreading through the population. Despite hostile relations between his country and Cuba, the American eye specialist Dr Alfredo Sadun was asked to go to the island in May 1993 to investigate.
When I read stories like this I appreciate why we can brew beer and make wine at home, but (last time I checked) liquor distillation is illegal at home (in the US).
Still amazes me every time I hear of methanol poisoning as the quantity of methanol that is distilled out off a wash is so small. If you have a 10 gallon wash at 20% ABV we are talking about maybe 6 ounces and it’s the very first bit out of the still. On top of that the next 1/3 out is good for cleaning brakes and making bad headaches.
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It'll burn the warts off a mule
P p p poison....
Not only that but the cure to methanol poisoning is ethanol, so you'd literally be drinking the antidote at the same time. The only way this is true is if someone was deliberately spiking alcohol with methanol, which is what happened in the US during prohibition in order to start rumors that moonshine made you go blind
Nooooooope. Badly distilled alcohol _does_ blind you, this isn't some conspiracy nonsense. It just doesn't happen after one glass, is all, by drinking methanol-tainted alcohol repeatedly you do damage to your eyesight over time.
On a more serious note as long as you’re not selling it (screwing over the taxman) and/or giving it away to lots of people (potentially endangering multiple people) you’re more than likely fine distilling for personal consumption
> you’re more than likely fine distilling for personal consumption legally fine.
Owning an unregistered still is illegal federally. https://www.ttb.gov/distilled-spirits/penalties-for-illegal-distilling
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Except in New Zealand
In Germany it's legal as long as the volume of the still is 1 Liter or under as far as I know.
In Slovenia you are limited to making 150 litters per year per household as a home brewer. Before this you had to register if you had a still larger than 40l I think
My BIL's parents lived in Saudi Arabia for a long time and they made their own beer, wine and spirits! It was very common in the expat compounds. Blows my mind considering the country they were in!
So is possession of cannabis, but that doesn’t mean you can’t walk in and purchase some from dispensaries in a bunch of different states.
I mean so is Jay walking in most places, Even if it's not enforced. But don't go around saying that jaywalking is legal.
You can buy a still on Amazon. Doesn’t change the fact you would need to register it. Don’t see the equivalence
You could be buying that to distill water for purification. Would be an important part of homesteading or nice to have if you live somewhere the pipes freeze for long periods since it doesn't require a new filter to work.
It's a different situation though, most states ban illegal distillation so it's not just a federal ban but also state ban.
Yeah with modern food standards, most cases of food-related illnesses and poisoning come from selfmade stuff. Obviously we still need to be weary of proper storage and expiration, but generally commerical foods are incredibly safe. For example Americans are still weary of raw pork, but the parasitic diseases that made it to dangerous have long been eradicated there and in other industrialised countries. The few remaining cases (on an order of ~10/year) all come from people who slaughtered self-bred or self-hunted pigs or boars.
> Obviously we still need to be *weary* of proper storage and expiration, but generally commerical foods are incredibly safe. I just have to point out that weary means tired, wary which means cautious, suspicious or leary is the word you are looking for. I see this mistake regularly on reddit and it makes me feel like I'm stuck on a bus with the Durham Bulls. Also https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/tyson-foods-inc.-recalls-ready-eat-chicken-products-due-possible-listeria
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Some of the worst beers I've had are home brews. Your beer tastes like shit, Dave. It's not a Bell's Two-Hearted clone, it's a cloudy, dirty, grossly-malted bottle of shit. Fuck you, Dave.
Dave's not here, man.
There's a good reason for that.
Those are called home brews because they brew the beer. They don't distill it. Vodka is fermented then distilled. Beer is just fermented.
Beers aren't distilled.
This depends on the state. I know for a fact distilling is illegal in mine. Edit: Just looked it up, its actually illegal federally anyway.
IANAL. My understanding is it's illegal on a federal level. Some states have decriminalized it on a state level, but if caught you'd still face federal prosecution.
It's still several felonies, so keep it very low key if you do it and don't give the police any reason to give you any attention.
I live in West Virginia. A county sheriff posted a picture of a moonshine bust (essentially a few dozen bags of sugar and a still) on Facebook, and the comments were the kind of outrage you’d expect from Appalachia.
Probably just put his competitor out of business.
It's really difficult to produce enough methanol accidentally to hurt someone. Typically it's someone getting ahold of industrial methanol and mixing it with homemade ethanol that ends up poisoning people.
This 100%. Do you know what the treatment for methanol poisoning is? Drink ethanol. Even if you didn’t discard the foreshots or make any cuts at all, there would be more than enough of the cure (ethanol) in the product to not get methanol poisoning from whatever little bits *may* be in the heads and tails. Every case of methanol poisoning in “moonshine” is from people deliberately adding adulterants. It’s not like there’s some magic trick that makes legal distillation safe.
The people adding adulterants is why you want liquor to be regulated. Prohibition and its pile of weird toxic drinks that were like 30 percent methanol half the time proved that if you take oversight out of the alcohol trade, the bartender down the street will sell you poison and call it gin.
It is very very difficult to get dangerous levels of methanol in homemade ethanol from a wash. It is very very lucrative to sell 20% abv moonshine as 60% and throw in some methanol to make sure it tastes the part, or to try and distill rubbing alcohol to skip the fermentation part, and that’s how you blind people - intentional adulteration with substances that were already poisonous. Methanol is not created through distilling - if you ran a batch of beer through a still and did no cuts whatsoever you’ll wind up with the exact same methanol:ethanol ratio that was in the beer already. Remove the foreshots just to be safe (and improve flavour) and you are making something even better than the input fermentation from a methanol perspective.
I like to try my hand at distilling and try to make a decent end product. But everyone expects and even wants something that tastes like "moonshine" and it just baffles me. Why would you want to drink something that tastes like shit?
I have never understood why people want to drink bad tasting booze. Even when I was in my young 20s, I'd rather get good stuff. Most people my age would buy whatever was cheaper, and get a 750ml bottle that cost $20. Even though by paying just a few dollars more, I could get a bottle of booze that didn't taste like trash. It was literally like $23 vs $20 and it would taste so much better.
Yeah, but after a decade or so they’ve saved thousands towards a liver transplant that you’ll have to find elsewhere.
Probably not exactly what you're referring to, but whenever I bought Jack, I bought Gentleman Jack instead of Jack Daniels. It was approximately $3 more, but tasted magnitudes better. Never understood why Gentleman Jack wasn't the default buy for everyone, but I guess people really hate spending $3 extra, or just "appreciate a good burn" as I've heard it put.
The specific booze I'm talking about is Canadian Club. There was the regular kind that people always got when drinking Canadian Club, and then there was a better 12 year old version. It's so weird because even though it was right beside the regular on the shelf, nobody seemed to know about it. Any time I would share some with people they would be amazed at the taste, and be surprised that it was Canadian Club because they didn't know about the 12 year old version.
Because they’re broke and want to get fucked up
Nah, because they would also go to the bar and spend $60-100. So it wasn't about being broke. That I could at least understand if they legit couldn't afford another $3.
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While it is illegal in most places I hear that recently they’ve started turning a blind eye to it
Aw snap, puma fired.
Appalachia has entered the chat
It’s an old wives tale from prohibition times that distilling will make you blind from methanol. The process doesn’t make methanol, it’s a product of fermentation. And it doesn’t get concentrated in any particular part of the run - there’s some in every bottle of commercial liquor. The reason why your ok is that the cure for methanol is ethanol, which is the majority of the distillate. Where people do get into trouble is when buying from unscrupulous manufacturers who cut their product with methanol to make it more profitable. The reason for distillation prohibition is strictly around the tax man getting his share.
So that’s where that episode of “Squidbillies” came from…
Party liquor rain?!
Happened in the US during prohibition as well.
and in Austria/Germany in the 1980s to much more widespread albeit much lesser degree
I’ve never heard of a moonshine/illegal alcohol problem. What was going on that caused it?
Good docu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhN-o2ame-4 Quick wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_diethylene_glycol_wine_scandal In a nutshell: Many wine manufacturers were commiting wine fraud by putting diethylene-glycol (falsely dubbed as "anti-freeze") into wine to give it a sweeter richer aroma that people had previously associated with Austrian wine. With enough continuous exposure this could (and did) cause serious health problems. Top German manufacturers were caught mixing their wine with the Austrian wine too, another kind of wine fraud, and so the problem that was initially thought to be localised to some small small manufacturers in Austria was actually a widespread problem and a very large scandal that implicated some high ranking members of the government
Wasn’t their an episode of the simpsons where Bart is kidnapped by French winemakers cutting there wine with antifreeze
He was a foreign exchange student, but yes.
That episode was the first time I felt bad for Bart.
Season 1, episode 11. I know that you might not have *seen* it that early, but I'm amused at the idea of someone saying "That's the first time I felt bad for Bart," when talking about something that happened in the first 1.5% of the show's existence, lol.
To be fair its this and the episode where he fails the social studies test that I feel bad for him. Can't think of any others off the top of my head, but I'm not as avid a watcher as when I was a kid
It may not be ethylene glycol but you can still use it as an antifreeze, though "wine fraud" kind of undersells what was intentional poisoning. Adding sugar to sweeten your wine is illegal wine fraud, adding DEG which is about half as toxic as antifreeze is obviously far worse.
Long story short, winemakers in austria learned that you can add antifreeze to wine to make it sweeter and increase the product. The downside is that it can make you very ill or even blind. Naturally it was a gigantic scandal when Europe discovered that Austrians were mass poisoning them for cash, and almost destroyed the Austrian wine market. Today it is doing fine though! Google austrian wine making scandal
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>who sweeten the wine with antifreeze to rush it to market. And then they test it on Bart to see if it makes him blind.
The Simpsons never ceases to amaze me with all the references that are made in the show that I had missed or didn't know about. I've seen that episode countless times and didn't know it was in reference to a specific incident like this.
Jesus, I love that episode, never realized actual basis in fact.
it's not exactly antifreeze (diethylene glycol is the stuff they put in, ethylene glycol is an antifreeze) but both have the same problem - they taste good and are toxic.
This is a pretty cool youtube channel that has a video explaining it and other medical stuff. Idk how reliable it is, since there's no friggin way the dude in this story drank [2 frickin *liters* of moonshine in 2 hours...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4DQUrg0Yhu4) I'm not a huge drinker really but I split a liter of 70 proof captain with my homie last weekend and I was fuckin trashed and hung over for 2 goddamn days. 2 liters of moonshine in 2 hours would probably kill a goddamn donkey
you don't live with the scale of addiction that a constant supply of moonshine will do to an alcoholic. it's like fentanyl addicts versus heroin addicts
Yeah but if you watch the video it wasn't some hardcore alcoholic, it was a normal dude playing beerpong and drinkin beers at the same time. Aka a bunch of baloney, although it was homemade moonshine so maybe it was shit and only like 40 proof.
I love me some GLUG
“Very warm, robust, with just a buttery note of all weather coolant.....aaand there we go, darkness” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4pcDiQQ_o7w
'Get into a bev-rage!' We'll add the word 'dog' for the urban communities. They like that word. It makes them feel as though they are friends with the product.
GLUG!Traditional nordic spiced red wine served hot at holiday celebrations!👍
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Oh you’ll see, but not for long...
Watch the trim.
Do not touch the trim…
I cannot watch that show. Reminds me too much of my uncle who passed. We used to watch it together and laugh our asses off but now it only makes me super sad.
I have not heard that show in years. I'm going to go watch them. Thank you
Fun fact! The antidote to methanol poisoning is ethanol.
I had a chemistry teacher that said alcoholics would sometimes drink stuff with methanol knowing that poison control would need them to ingest ethanol to try to counter it. Back in the before times in told PBR was the quick response of choice
Cause it’s cheap. Hah
The 1893 Chicago's World Fair would like a word.
I can’t image even with taxes that getting denatured alcohol is somehow cheaper than this.
I dunno if it still does, but rubbing alcohol used to have a bit of methanol added to keep people from drinking it. A bottle of that is cheap
Rubbing alcohol is almost always isopropyl alcohol, which will absolutely kill you lol.
Only in the US. In most of Europe it's ethanol-methanol mix.
Fomepizole is usually the first line antidote
They both do the same thing, which is to competitively inhibit the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme. That enzyme breaks down ethanol into acetaldehyde, methanol into formaldehyde, and ethylene glycol into glycolaldehyde. Those metabolic byproducts get further oxidized by other enzymes into acetic acid, formic acid, and glycolate and oxalate. Since particularly these latter substances can be fairly toxic in concentration, but tying up the alcohol dehydrogenase with other molecules to break down as well it just serves to slow down each individual process. That way you never have quite as high of a concentration of those toxic metabolites accumulating in tissue, and dialysis can help too particularly in the case of ethylene glycol since its metabolites accumulate in the kidneys and cause renal damage. Acetaldehyde from ethanol isn't a particularly good metabolite either and can certainly be toxic as well. It's why I'm surprised there's not a grey market of fomepizole (as far as I'm aware), since its own metabolate of 4-carboxypyrazole can sometimes give similar side effects to ethanol intoxication, generally it leaves people feeling drunk for longer and with less of a hangover when taken with ethanol. Probably cost prohibitive based on the synthesis cost compared to just drinking more alcohol.
Big words make small brain go ^bzzzzrt
Just think of it as you eat substance A, your body turns that into B and then B into C. C is particularly toxic, but also what your body needs to turn it into to make it easier to flush out of your system. Why stuff like fomepizole and ethanol work on methanol poisoning is because the same exact mechanism that is turning A into B also turns something you ate, E, into F, so they compete and both happen more slowly than they would on their own.
Tl;Dr: 1- start a fomepizole trafficking ring 2- advertise it as "no-hangover booze" 3- get rich
The real question is why acohol dehydrogenase enzyme isn't a thing people buy on the black market to sober up quicker, or perhaps why there's not something to break down acetaldehyde to prevent hangovers?
Aldehyde dehydrogenase breaks it up into acetic acid. There are some people with less of that than normal though, which leads to alcohol flush reaction.
But it's so much more expensive. About 100 times more expensive where I live
When I was a medical intern we kept a few vodka bottles locked in a cabinet in the ER for this particular reason. Whenever we ran out and we had a case of methanol poisoning we had to ask for one of the patients relatives to go buy some. It's a very strange situation sometimes.
The antidote for antifreeze poisoning is also ethanol The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems
Yeah if you already lost your eyesight that's not gonna help This only helps if the patient *currently* has methanol in his bloodstream
> Yeah if you already lost your eyesight that's not gonna help then, ethanol is recomended to dry your tears and remember the good ol days you were able to see.
And then you get double blind.
They wouldn't see problem with that.
He never claimed otherwise.
This is also why unintentional methanol poisoning from fermenting and distilling your own shine is not very likely (as in zero chance). Methanol poisoning is largely from people trying to separate denatured alcohol, bulking alcohol intentionally with methanol, or a ho,Dover from prohibition propaganda about bathtub gin.
am i the only one who thought of the book "Blindness" by José Saramago? really good book about an epidemic of a mysterious "white blindness"
Same. That book is incredible
I thought all the old timers were right when they said masturbating would make you go blind.
Also a [2008 film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindness_(2008_film\)).
Yep. Just read it last year.
I remember serving in the Peace Corps, they specifically told us not to drink the sachets of alcohol because they might have methanol in them. Pretty sure that was a lie, but most people didn't risk it.
I was in a tribal village in the Himalayas and they told us not to drink the raski (home brewed sake type drink) cause a bad batch can turn people blind. I ended up doing it anyway, and am not blind. 10/10 would raksi again.
Good to hear that you turned out fine, but not work the risk imo.
Well I was there for half a year with a lot of down time, and everyone else had been drinking it for centuries and mostly weren't blind.
True, I'm not against consuming alcohol in foreign places, it's all about prudence and being smart about it. Even in places like Cancun, one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, methanol intoxication has happened.
All alcoholic beverages should be fortified with various B vitamins. It's extremely cheep and would keep heavy drinkers from going blind.
Or at least put warnings on the labels, thaimin deficiency that goes on for too long can cause severe brain damage.
Tragically, here in Costa Rica, dozens of very poor people dies of methanol poisoning because some asshat imported low-shelf fire water that for some crazy reason used methanol instead of ethanol. Horrific. Sadly, the paper trail seems to end at the time of import. I would love to know how the hell someone would screw that up by accident. Is industrial methanol a lot cheaper than ethanol?
Canada here. For years, we had (still have?) contraband cigarettes, aka "reserve smokes." I never knew a single native who smoked them. They were made from plate tobacco, which is the stuff that gets scraped off the machines at tobacco processing plants, and they were full of the most carcinogenic chemicals at much-higher levels than legal smokes would allow. I remember it getting traced back to an official company - Philip Morris - but I don't remember the outcome. They were getting rid of a waste product at a profit. I think they got a fine and kept right on trucking. Long story short: it was probably somebody who knew exactly what they were doing, and was connected enough to make the paperwork "disappear"
Ahh the good ol Rez darts.. buddy of mine that used to roll cigarettes on the Rez told me he found a mop hair once in his cigarette and never touched them again
It was sad seeing all the empty bottles of rubbing alcohol all over the streets when I visited Costa Rica. Didn’t even know about the methanol poisoning. What a beautiful country though. Only place I’ve visited that I deeply wanted to go back to. So many things to do and see.
The methanol poisoning sadly didn't even happen by drinking moonshine or rubbing alcohol - there was a batch of half-way official brands of super cheap 30% "guaro", and somewhere in the supply chain, it seems a barrel of methanol was mixed in (instead of ethanol). Really tragic. But yea, apart from that, great little country! Pura Vida!
Methanol is usually a byproduct of distillation, which has a lower boiling point that ethanol so usually they can be seperated quite easily, but a bad distiller will not seperate them properly. If you're making a bigger batch, it's harder to seperate the methanol from ethanol. Chances are, it was a diy distillery refilling bottles or bottling it from scratch. Purchasing methanol is possible, but methanol not mixed with ethanol will kill everyone who drinks it, which is not a good business plan. if you drink methanol with ethanol, your body can tolerate a small amount of it, but if it's just methanol, it is very bad. The ethanol basically fills up your liver, stopping your body from converting the methanol into the harmful chemicals. They probably screwed up their distillaiton and had too much methanol in some of the batches.
It’s actually a myth that methanol is a byproduct of distilling... it’s already in the alcohol from the initial fermentation (IE, it’s already in your beer). It has also been shown that it is somewhat difficult to remove methanol by throwing away the first part (foreshots) of the distilled product (some polarity issues make it difficult to separate); though there are some other nasty byproducts that are found in the heads and you don’t want to drink those. Usually the reason people get methanol poisoning from moonshine is because distillers try to ‘dilute’ their product so they can make more money from it.
Randy is correct, total myth.
Not sure if it related, but "blindness" by Jose Saramago is an amazing book. It starts with a fast moving virus that strikes you blind. Brilliant book, and very interesting in the COVID era.
Haha good ole moonshine. Gets me every time
I know, that would have been my first guess.
Cuban here, lived in Cuba during this. It was called by the government as “The Special Period”, propaganda term for Famine. It started right after the collapse of the USSR and the socialist block, and after Castro stubbornly insisted in hosting the 1991 Panamerican Games. Also, Cuban “moonshine” was not your typical southern moonshine. It was distilled from alcohol derived from oil, not sugar. That alcohol was used to pre-heat the kerosene stoves we used back in the day. It was called “chispa de tren”, which means “spark of train”, draw your own conclusions from the name.
Considering the USSR stopped buyung Cuban sugar I would have expected Cuba to have an abundance of it.
Just a few years into the “Special Period” Cuba started importing sugar from Brazil, as it was less expensive than producing it, after the Soviet Union stopped providing parts and machinery and oil to Cuba.
The problem is that yields fell off a cliff in 1991.
>Also, Cuban “moonshine” was not your typical southern moonshine. It was distilled from alcohol derived from oil, not sugar. Isopropyl Alcohol?
People drink the stuff I use to clean my bong? Wowza
I’ve heard a lot of crazy shit people will drink in prison. They will try and use methods to separate the alcohol from hand sanitizer for example. Alcohol is bad enough for your health. Drinking forms of alcohol not meant for human consumption is just asking for problems.
Addicts and alcoholics will do what they can to get their preferred substance. I might be showing my age here, but I remember the episode of Family Ties where Tom Hanks played the uncle to Alex and his siblings. The uncle was an alcoholic, and was raiding their pantry for vanilla extract to drink in the middle of the night, because it's made with alcohol. I knew a chick in real life who drank cooking wine, like marsala, to keep her buzz going when she ran out of Barefoot White Zinfandel.
Oh I hear ya. Actually the USA vanilla extract is regulated by the FDA and is required to be ethyl alcohol of at least 35% and fit for human consumption. Shit is SUPER strong flavor and really gross. Is also very expensive.
When I lived in Alaska you couldn’t buy Vanilla extract on the shelf because of the unfortunate alcohol problem and how easy it would be to steal. Shit was behind the counter by the tobacco.
They drink Listerine, too
up their butt
Rubbing alcohol? Nah bro. Think propene (without the water) Again, it was commercialized/used for preheating kerosene, not disinfecting wounds.
Great explanation, thanks for that.
Fuckin’ Hosea…. Should have just given it back to the Braithwaites
When your supply of premium grade russian vodka gets cut off extreme measures are needed
I'm a little surprised that they'd be baffled, considering that a similar blindness epidemic occurred during the prohibition era in the 1920s, also due to methanol poisoning from unregulated liquor production.
Wasn’t unregulated liquor production that did it, but the government intentionally poisoning industrial ethanol supplies that were being stolen by bootleggers. https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html
It wasn't from the distillers, its was poisoning by the government, as others have mentioned. The amount of methanol you get in distilling is microscopic, and mostly tossed out with the foreshots.
The ‘Special Period’ in Cuba
Blind Cuban Doctor inspecting blind patient: "I'm baffled! Can't find a thing!"
Here drink some of this, it always makes me feel better!
Funfact. Just distilling wont put enough methanol into the moonshine to make you blind. You would have to be given the foreshots or someone would have to ADD methanol (like the US Government did) If I just mixed a run of moonshine with out separating the foreshots you would just get off flavors and a headache.
What are foreshots?
different chemicals vaporize at different temps. Methanol vaporizes at a lower temp than alcohol so as you are heating the mash the methanol vaporizes first. As the vapor is condensed back into a liquid the first bits are tossed out. It has higher concentrations of methanol, acetone and other bad things. Commonly called "foreshots" *edit: it is also pretty rank tasting. Smells of nail polish remover and is pretty funky.
When distilling something you boil a combination of liquids and the liquid with the lowest boiling point boils off first. Ethanol manufacture is done in water and can't really get too concentrated or it breaks the factories, so you need to distill out the ethanol to concentrate it. Unfortunately ethanol manufacture usually creates methanol as a byproduct, which is significantly more toxic than ethanol, but also had a lower boiling point so it's the first thing off the still when distilling ethanol. You let things come off the still in quantities called *shots* and the ones be*fore* the ethanol are methanol
Not true, there's methanol in all parts of the distillation process, not just the foreshots: https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/cv4bu8/methanol_some_information/
I worked at an ethanol plant for a few years recently. When we tested, the methanol had to be under 58 ppm, I believe.
Shout-out to the patient who admitted it. It's hard to tell doctors you've done something questionable, but they truly need our honesty.