nik282000 2 days ago

Huh, I thought if you held the outlet of the still at 79c until you stopped getting distillate then you could be reasonably sure that you took out most of the the majority of the methanol.

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mattmaroon 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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3eb7988a1663 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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mattmaroon 2 days ago | parent [-]

No, I’m not. I’m pointing out that distillation doesn’t work how you were told it does in middle school which is the reflexive argument people are making. The argument that all the methanol comes out early because it has a lower boiling point is simply incorrect. Mass spectromery proves it.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.3c00627

When you get into distilling you learn pretty fast that a lot of what you’ve been told about it is fake due to both deliberate propaganda, and the fact that a lot of it was learned before we had scientific tools to investigate deeper.

You would pretty much have to try to poison yourself distilling and yet everybody thinks it’s a real risk.

Being poisoned by a bootlegger who adds methanol because it’s cheaper (much like fentanyl in opiods) is not a fake risk, and a lot of people who think the first thing happened actually had the second thing happen.

And I’m certainly not criticizing people for this, I went to school for physics and yet was on the other side of this debate when I started distilling before I did research.

	▲	eudamoniac a day ago \| parent [-]
		Need a non-paywalled link to glean anything here, because the abstract does not mention the distillation method. Were they even trying to boil off the methanol first?