Missed in the previous discussion: methanol is irrelevant. Grain based ferments have essentially zero methanol.(And methanol risk is a function of its concentration relative to ethanol — the treatment for methanol poisoning is… ethanol!) even fruit based fermentations with significantly higher pectin concentrations only produce trace methanol, and it’s not all that well concentrated in a distillation due to azeotropes (which also says that throwing out the heads doesn’t help that much).

Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol. The biggest risk in home distilling is fire.

▲

delichon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the treatment for methanol poisoning is… ethanol!

My grandpa drank a shot of schnapps every night and called it his medicine. I thought it was a euphemism but apparently he was actually taking an antidote prophylactically. You can't be too careful. He never once got methanol poisoning.

	▲	PyWoody 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Was his doctor Dr. McGillicuddy?

▲

jppope 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol

Pretty sure this was a relic of prohibition right? The feds would contaminate ethanol with methanol to keep people from drinking it, but then they hurt a bunch of people and never faced any consequences...

	▲	thaumasiotes 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Pretty sure this was a relic of prohibition right? The feds would contaminate ethanol with methanol to keep people from drinking it We still do this now. We don't do it because alcohol is illegal, we do it because we levy higher taxes on non-poisonous alcohol, and if someone decides to drink the poisoned alcohol, they deserve what they get.

▲

jbellis 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the treatment for methanol poisoning is… ethanol!

I looked this up, it is directionally correct but if you are in a hospital setting they have better options https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482121/

▲

gostsamo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As someone living in the Balkans, home brewing is a national passtime for every nation around. When every family has its own recipe for brewing alcohol, killing ourselves would've been achieved many centuries ago if it was a real concern. Methanol is an issue when some dumbshit decides to cell chemically produced trash on industrial scale instead of buying the expensive ingredients.

▲

htx80nerd 4 hours ago | parent [-]

almost every year there is a news story of some Western tourist visiting another country dying from bootleg methanol alcohol

	▲	gostsamo 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As I said, this happens when someone tries to sell illegally produced trash created not by brewing but with sugar, chemical essence, and whatever they've mistaken for ethanol. The tax on alcohol creates a black market and some people taking part in it are either dumb or lazy and those are the cases you hear about.
	▲	theodric 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Raised and addressed in an earlier post on an earlier article on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736298#47737600

▲

cucumber3732842 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Was it missed or intentionally downplayed/ignored because people came into the discussion with priors that they were eager to maintain?

Seems like these sorts of "yes it could be unsafe in theory but the reality of physics and incentives make this mostly irrelevant" type things get missed far too often certain parts of the internet to be coincidence.

That said, the fact that it dropped on a weekend did it no favors the first time around.

	▲	ch4s3 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Speaking as a brewer, I can tell you that tons of people who should know better actually believe the methanol thing and will even quote some sciency words to make their argument. I think its a case of bad information coming from black market distilling being propagated uncritically. People who know better (licensed distillers) have no incentive to argue against it.