My grandfather died in the Athena, Georgia, jail in 1965 from drinking bad moonshine.
Fermentation naturally produces methanol, and distilling concentrates it.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s quite possible to inadvertently consume a dangerous — even lethal — dose.
TL;DR don’t do this.
Freeze distillation moonshine videos getting 10m views probably a solid recession indicator:
*Athens, Georgia
This isnt quite the same but the high cost of food and the rise of MAHA has lead to renegade canners and I'm worried about an uptick in food borne illnesses. I just watched a video of a woman freezing Mac and cheese (safe) and a commenter responded that she canned Mac n cheese. /1
Omg. That’s wild and horrible.
In case anyone is wondering, Methanol basically creates an acid (formic acid) as you metabolize it and that destroys your body from the inside out.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvfo...
YouTube video by Inside Edition
The fairly high likelihood of ending up with methanol when trying to distill at home places this in the same general category as foraged wild mushrooms for me.
My grandpa destroyed the basement bathroom and nearly burned down their house attempting to make homemade wine when my Mom was a kid. And he was an engineer!
Doing research on Prohibition-era Potomac River rum runners and there was a story of a wild turkey eating leftover mash from a still the cops just busted up and it fell over dead nearly instantly. Turns out the inexperienced shiner used sheet iron to make his still instead of copper.
I mean... That's how eisbier is made. The methanol content is too low to be a concern at any volume you can produce in the home.
To be clear, all fermentation that produces ethanol also produces methanol, even beer and wine. In those, it's diluted in a large volume, whereas evaporative distillation tends to concentrate the methanol in the first few aliquots produced. Ice distillation would probably be in between.
My high school chemistry teacher would have saved time & suffering by just murdering anyone who tried this. He liked his class to be "informative" in all the most exciting ways. We did, actually, have to distill alcohol with fire to pass. And taste it for full credit on the assignment.
Historical methanol poisoning was caused by bootleggers using denatured industrial ethanol, not improper distillation techniques. Only way you're getting seriously sick from freeze distilled DIY wine is if you badly fuck up the brew and get mold or something. www.newpaltz.edu/media/histor...
Turkey dramatically increased the sin taxes on alcohol over the past decade and there has been a corresponding uptick in mass methanol poisoning cases reported in the press
and if people cant be stopped: when distilling throw away the first initial 20-50ml
if methanol poisoned: get to the er, dont be alone, drink more ethanol (bc thats gonna avoid the body metabolising methanol. still gonna endanger you but when methanol poisoned, thats the lesser evil)
Also like, it’s painfully easy to make bad beer. My grandpa makes his from a shitty LME he doesn’t even boil, much less temp control during fermentation. Dude was accidentally making sour beer before it was cool. But here he is being 97, still making and drinking the stuff. Be like that grandpa.
I was legit thinking the same thing. Unless you're an expert at distillation, you're not going to know how to get the MeOH out of this...and like, I would say it's not necessarily complicated, but it's not a task I'd give to an amateur.
probably won't kill you, but it'll be a hangover -machine-
A friend of the family was a moonshiner and he still would have the occasional accident. Not worth.
If you have to make your own alcohol do something like mead or beer! Significantly less likely to kill you if you duck it up!
