If it works that way, why doesn’t ethanol come off the still entirely and then water? There’s over a 20 degree gap between their boiling points and yet anyone who has ever distilled will tell you that they see a mix that’s at least 20% water at the very start. (You measure as you go along.) This is still well below the azeotropic mix too.

And, later on in distillation, when you’re much closer to the boiling point of water than ethanol, there will still be some ethanol coming out.

I get why you think that, I did too before diving deeper, but I assure you, your mental model of how distillation works is incorrect.

Yes

Oversimplified might be a better description but there needs to be a rule even dumb people can use

So the rule is: discard whatever comes first

If you expect every home distiller to understand the nuances of this you're going to end up with a lot of "accidents"

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Having seperate boiling points wont matter if they form into an azeotrope. Not all liquids can be distilled from one another even though every liquid has a different boiling point.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fac...

It’s quite common for people to add methanol to illegal liquor because it can be made cheaply from natural gas and is sold industrially everywhere. You are much more likely to be injured buying bootleg alcohol than making it.

It’s more prevalent, and you might reduce the ratio of it, I was just pointing out that more than you expect will remain in even after tossing the fores.

And even if you just distilled until it was basically water coming out, then re-blended everything, you have not significantly worsened the ratio of the two

You can. I think parent is using some technicality of how distillation is not going to get you to 100.0000% purity.

> how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are

They're not technically complex, but you need space and time for them, and producing a beer you would actually want to drink and bottling it isn't trivial.

I know one guy who moonshines for family-and-friends consumption, not sale, and I'll pass. It's not that much cheaper than just buying it (note: my state alcohol taxes are not that high) and it's a lot more work. I might make a batch of wine -> brandy from fruits that grew on a tree in my back yard if I had plums, just to say I did, but I'm not interested in making a big batch of corn liquor.

>Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata.

It's very difficult to ban something when even the police do it. I'm guessing that the number of cops who like a drink is somewhere around "most".

> The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor.

This would suggest that using induction heating would be significantly safer and have the possibility of precise temperature control. Is there any reason why home distilling does/does not do this?

Yes, that is true. But almost no one really does this, cutting the head is what is usually done and I have never heard of someone poisoning themselves with homemade țuică. It's fine, really. It seems USians are convinced homemade hooch will blind you without having absolutely no personal experience with it.

The eastern part of Czechia (Moravia) plus Slovakia will distill anything that grows, too, and methanol poisonings are almost non-existent here. Don't underestimate centuries of tradition and know-how.

The only exception was a methanol affair 15 years ago, but that had nothing to do with home distillation. In that particular case, two bozos inspired by a badly understood Wikipedia article bought and mixed enormous amounts of industrial methanol with ethanol and sold the resulting mixture on the black market, killing dozens of people and triggering a temporary prohibition as the authorities scrambled to find all the poisoned booze.

They are now both serving life.

Depends what you make it from. If you distill eight litres of wine into about a litre brandy without removing methanol, it has the same amount of methanol than eight litres of wine did. Given the average of 150mg/l of methanol in red wine, this puts it to about 1g of methanol in that amount. That is not healthy, but you need to keep in mind ingestion of alcohol slows down the metabolism of methanol through competition and the methanol will be excreted by your kidneys instead of being metabolized.

So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.

Not great, but I'm not blind.

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