> 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.