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Comment by kergonath | Hacker News Reader

> If anything, tequila has way more of an effect on poor judgment...

Absinthe was around 70% abv. Much easier to overdose on alcohol than with 40-odd % tequila. It is although understood that there was a lot of adulterated absinthe around. And even in the presumably good stuff, the distillation techniques of the time left somewhat to be desired and the resulting drinks contained nasty chemicals (notably methanol).

That said, I still think the moral panic was completely out of proportion and, as the article mentions, absinthe ended up being a convenient scapegoat. It is very similar to how gin was seen in England.

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> resulting drinks contained nasty chemicals (notably methanol).

This is a popular myth for two reasons:

- you can’t make enough methanol to harm you through fermentation alone. Stories of methanol poisoning are more likely due to unscrupulous bootleggers adding it in.

- you can’t separate methanol from ethanol using fractional distillation. There are things that do fraction out, like fusel oils. Methanol isn’t one of them.

This means that the ratio of methanol to ethanol in the distilled drink will be pretty much the same as in the unfermented version. It is higher in ferments done with fruit skin, but not possible to actually harm yourself, especially in the presence of ethanol, which is used to treat methanol poisoning.

Got sources on your claims? All the sources for the second one, that I can find, say methanol and ethanol can be separated by fractional distillation, that it is isopropyl and ethanol that is troublesome due to their close boiling points. See for instance this patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US4013521A/en on purifying methanol

https://homedistiller.org/wiki/index.php/Methanol explains it well with links to sources

There are lots of incorrect sources on the internet concerning this. It’s not like there’s any organization trying to dispel the myth, and the same false claims get repeated over and over.

The separation isn't perfect, but the first vapors of distillation (the heads) are discarded precisely because they have a higher concentration of methanol.

Methanol boils at 65 C, ethanol at 78. Again, you wont get a perfect separation, but there's enough of a difference that you can get rid of a fair amount.

You’re wrong. Distillation just doesn’t work that way. There are lots of good reasons to get rid of the foreshots, but methanol ain’t one. https://homedistiller.org/wiki/index.php/Methanol

That, and the French wine lobby.

Funnily enough 110 years later, Pernod-Ricard is the #2 spirits and liquors group in the world.

Thank you for the thoughtful answer! I’d never heard that history.

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