US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence and that's totally normal, that's what freedom is.

As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.

The common knowledge about methanol being a huge risk is wildly overstated in reality, and likely continues in part because it benefits the government for people to believe strongly in the danger and continue to purchase taxed liquor. Distillation does not create new chemicals: there is methanol in your bottle of wine, and distilling that wine into brandy does not change the ratio, it only removes (primarily) water. Common distilling practice is to dispose of the highest concentrations of the most volatile components (acetaldehyde, higher alcohols). Low levels of methanol remain present in a gradient throughout the distilled product. Methanol production in fermentation is not a significant risk if you're not fermenting woody materials, and its production can be mitigated through the use of pectic enzyme. Methanol IS a risk if you're starting with cheap, untaxed denatured alcohol (ethanol+methanol+bitterants+other crap) as your input, rather than the unadulterated output of a sugar fermentation, and that is mainly what gave rise to the popular methanol folklore.

That said, don't break the law, folks. It's not worth going to prison for tax evasion over a jug of shine. You can get just as tipsy off a couple glasses of fermented supermarket apple juice, and it's legal and cheaper to boot.

From ~1906 through prohibition the Feds purposely poisoned industrial alcohol with methanol and other chemicals as a deterrent. 100 years ago, in 1926, they increased it, up to as much as 10%. This was true rotgut. Around 10,000 people, mostly poor, died from it. Blindness, organ failure, paralysis. This was legal and regulated by the Volstead Act. It was the primary source of methanol poisoning during prohibition.

Well, I live in a country with both huge distillation culture and significantly non-zero number of methanol poisonings, and they never happen from home brewing. It's really hard to homebrew/distill methanol in a quantity enough to poison you in an otherwise ethanol solution (which acts as an antidote).

It's so rare this thread is literally the first time I've heard about possibility of methanol poisoning from homebrewing.

Methanol poisonings happen from bootlegging, where someone in the chain of supply sells industrial methanol as an ethanol, because the first one is cheaper, easier to obtain and untaxed.

Small-scale distillation is fine. Ten bottles of wine have 500mg of methanol, which is mostly fine for most people even if it all ends up in the same shot -- which it won't; it'll be split between 1-2 750ml bottles even if you do absolutely nothing to remove it from the ethanol.

Batches under a certain size don't have a problem with methanol poisoning. You need a large enough batch that you get a high percentage of methanol in the "heads". Usually for batches under 100L, it's not an issue. A sensible policy would be limiting "home" distillation to 50L batches (which is a lot of booze; hard to argue you need more than that in a batch for private consumption).

There is precisely 0 methanol risk in distilling grain based alcohol. The quantity of methanol produced is minuscule a the antidote is ethanol which is also present. Any methanol poisoning is from adulteration with industrial alcohol which has large volumes of methanol added intentionally to make it undrinkable.

The antidote to methanol is just ethanol.

If you find yourself drinking something untrustworthy you can at least cure yourself with a chaser of an equivalent amount of everclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity#Treatment

As someone who's involved in said home production, the only way someone is getting methanol poisoning is if it's intentional done.

I wonder whether government testing actually makes a material difference in food/beverage safety.

For example, when I worked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, I was surprised to discover that the percentage of imported food/beverage actually tested for safety is very low. Like comically, microscopically, unbelievably low.

In the United States, I suspect concerns over reputation and civil litigation do more to keep our food safe than government testing.

So is food poisoning. Time to ban cooking.

Most of methanol poisoning during the Prohibition happened because the government deliberately poisoned ethanol supplies, to prevent them from being converted to drinking spirits. This insane policy caused 10 to 50 thousands deaths. There's no good data about how many died from moonshine methanol poisoning, but likely, outside of prohibition years, the numbers are in low tens per year.

Methanol/CH3OH/MeOH is poisonous and its consumption causes a life-threatening health crisis that often results in death or permanent blindness. As little as 100 ml of methanol can kill or cause lifelong damage to one's health.

One shouldn't have to restate these well-known facts but they have to be repeated at every opportunity because in many ways methanol too closely resembles ethanol/EtOH, it tastes the same and induces drunkenness, and consumers may not become aware they have consumed it until its toxic effects manifest. By then, it's often too late.

Methanol's similarly to ethanol and that it's a very important industrial chemical made and used in huge qualities that makes it doubly dangerous. Many ways exist for methanol to enter the food chain both accidentally and through deliberate substitution for ethanol so it's especially important that strict regulations exist covering its handling and use.

Outside of lab grade reagents, methanol should always be denatured in ways that make its consumption both obvious and intolerable, that's best achieved by adding the denaturant denatonium (benzoate or saccharinate) in trace amounts that have little or no effect on methanol's final use.

Denatonium (aka, Bitrix, Bitrex and others), a quaternary ammonium compound, is a bitterant and likely the bitterest substance known and can be tasted by humans in parts per billion. Not only is it extremely bitter but unlike lemons it's a nasty bitterness that lingers and will immediately alert anyone who tastes it (I know, having deliberately tasted it).

HN is read internationally, so in places with good methanol handling regulations there's little doubt I'm sounding like an annoying schoolteacher overstating the obvious but from my experience many people do not know how dangerous methanol really is. As mentioned, one reads of travelers in foreign countries poisoned with drinks laced with methanol without giving a thought where their drinks originate (moreover the most vulnerable are those who come from places with good food regulations as they automatically assume what they're served is suitable for consumption).

My rave isn't to put the kibosh on homebrew spirits as I'm essentially in favor of this decision—government already dictates too many things we citizens cannot do. That said, there has to be strict regulations concerning distillation methods and commercial sales should definitely be unlawful with tough penalties.

Finally, whether this decision hold up under appeal or not, we need readily-available methanol detectors that are both cheap and portable and that anyone can easily use.

pretext to context.

> Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.

Another way to increase safety is to reduce the availability of illegal stills without quality control by enforcing the ban.

(Anyone who thinks otherwise presumably also thinks all hard drugs should be legalized since this presumably wouldn't lead to an increase in consumption.)

Is there a genuine opportunity to overturn either Wickard or Raich? That would be exciting.

The court invalidated IRC Sections 5601(a)(6) and 5178(a)(1)(B), finding they go beyond Congress’s taxation powers. The court’s reasoning was that these provisions amount to an “anti revenue provision” that prevents distilled spirits from coming into existence, since under 26 U.S.C. § 5001(b) taxation begins as soon as the spirit exists, so banning production eliminates the taxable event entirely.

Here are the official docs for the case

McNutt v. US Department of Justice

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca5.220...

The Fifth Circuit tells us how the Supremes will vote.

If laws were written by engineers, all sums of money would be expressed relative to median income.

And at that point it wouldn't be a stretch for most people to make the connection that some people are more privileged than others and fines should be relative to personal wealth and income.

Imagine if laws were written by people who know what a function is...

Alcohol is always poisonous (but mixed with methanol quite a bit more poisonous ) :-)

Anything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe.

I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.

Distilling at home was fairly traditional long before high alcohol prices. Sure, high prices encourages some folks and helps ensure there is space for a black market. But technically, the high prices didn't cause distilling.

I visited Norway and was blown away by the price of alcohol. Given that the sun only comes out for a fraction of an hour in winter I struggled to believe it. At a local bar... (I think I was in trondheim?) I asked how they afforded booze? (it worked out to 15$ USD per pint), "We don't, but we do it anyways"

Home distillation is very popular in Poland too. Risk of getting poisoned from it is near zero in practice. In some parts of Poland there is more home-distilled alcohol bottles at the tables during weddings than commercial ones.

In many European countries you will be offered home-distilled drinks, you would be very unlucky to get anything else than hangover.

The problem is overblown.

You’re confusing a few of the issues here. This isn’t an interstate commerce case, it’s a tax power case, which does reflect on the NFA but not on Wickard v Filburn or civil rights. The important aspects of federal civil rights law aren’t legally justified by the commerce clause either.

Though I would gladly see Wickard v Filburn overturned. Commercial regulations already vary by state, and the US would still be more cohesive than the EU is today, but the amount of water that flows through my showerhead doesn’t have to be a concern of the federal government. In fact, we don’t even need Wickard v Filburn to be a more cohesive federation than Canada, which doesn’t even have free trade between provinces.

> No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.

States can still do civil rights etc.

>Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia.

How so? For medical reasons? For the facilitation of the Saudi Aramco oil production which funds the life and habitation of humans in Dhahran?

I suspect something was lost in translation.

How does Texas law affect the possibility of distilling in a Saudi compound? What’s the jurisdiction there?