I'm convinced. And it's making me think anyone that disagrees hates apple pie and America.
use yeast to convert sugars from apples into alcohol: fermentation
boil that until it becomes a concentrated liquor: distillation
distillation is significantly more dangerous than fermenting
TIL: Apparently the nickname for distilled apple cider is applejack. Never realized the origin of the cereal's name.
i really don't want to die because the downstairs neighbor wants to make his own craft vodka
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/5178
Considering the danger of distilling and most people do not have that much land; you likely would need to get approval from govt agencies anyway to be legal.
But also I do appreciate how many numbskulls there are out there.
They’d occasionally go blind from methanol in the shine or slowly give themselves lead poisoning from the solder in the still, but no fires. So, they were at least safety-aware enough not to want to lose all their product and get the authorities on their case by burning down the area around their still.
Do you perhaps mean fermentation? Distillation is exceptionally easy and not particularly difficult to clean up after. It remains perfectly safe provided you have a cheap digital thermometer, understand the importance of good ventilation, and use off the shelf parts. (The latter only because a custom setup built by a particularly incompetent individual could inadvertently result in the creation of a dangerous pressure vessel.)
Without any snark or rudeness, your comment betrays how little you know about distilling.
I've been distilling liquor for probably 5+ years, and it's quite safe if you have any common sense. And the same comment could apply to brewing, canning, cooking, vehicle repair, skateboarding, etc.
it is not significantly more dangerous, and has been done for ages
The way this is solved in our country is that you can legally make your own alcohol, but only at a state-approved distillery, where the personnel knows how to handle this.
you don't need "to know how to get rid of it" -- there are no skills needed: just pour it out.
you literally just pour out the first 0.5% of whatever comes out of the still. water it down heavily and flush it down the toilet or burn it or whatever. I literally just take the first ~25-50ml of liquid and ditch it -- problem solved.
all other nasty compounds have a very noticeable smell and are fairly easy to detect coming out of the still.
the "public health threat" is literally a prohibition scare-the-rubes meme.
So you have to 1) remember that and 2) calculate how much will come out. You will be surprised to hear not everybody does.
> the "public health threat" is literally a prohibition scare-the-rubes meme.
I'm not from the US, we never had prohibition. We however had people poisoned (blind or dead) by methanol - I'm originally from the countryside and making and drinking fruit spirits is very common here.
Also more people dead from methanol sold as alcohol on industrial scale - like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Czech_Republic_methanol_p... - of course this happened because the alcohol taxes are high, but OTOH if they weren't high, people would drink even more, and that reverberates through the health system and society as a whole.
So they are concerned about unlicensed explosions?
so cider them, and that'll stay stable for weeks / months. longer if cold and well stored.
"jack" it via freezing or distill it w/ boiling and the booze will stick around even longer
And the average cooking or dessert apples doesn't make for great cider. While sugar is important (and cider apples can have more than dessert or cooking apples), tanins, acidity, and phenols are also very useful to cidermaking even though they make the apples themselves rather unpalatable.
Now I think it's dumb to prohibit home distillers and it actually inhibits industry evolution. There is a lot of experimentation that happens in grey areas of the law with homemade spirits and it would be interesting to see how things adapt if the law was lifted.
All that said home distillation is dangerous. Ethanol at volumes sufficient for bottling is explosive, methanol poisoning is real, and even if the techniques for safely distilling it from a mash are learned in a high school chemistry class most people aren't great at it.
I'm a big whiskey enjoyer and home cook and have done a few "dangerous" things myself w/ food and beverages. If the law goes away I know I'm going to do some stuff in the basement and accept the risk myself. But I'm a little wary of laws being lifted that definitely protect people, even if it's a side effect of taxation.
Even just a half decent kitchen knife will be razor sharp and capable of removing a digit or two if handled incorrectly.
As to the gasoline, please do note that incompetent distilling was being compared to incompetent storage there. So then the gasoline hasn't been properly capped off and has been left in (for example) a garden shed with insufficient airflow. That's once again likely to be more dangerous.
Do also consider that people in the US regularly deep fry using a gas burner. It seems self evident to me that heating a vat of oil to near the smoke point and then making it sizzle, all the while over an open flame, has to be vastly more dangerous on average than what you described.
Also you don't necessarily need to use an open flame to distill. An electric range works perfectly well.
No, it is not. Not more dangerous than rice stir‑frying
> methanol poisoning is real
Ethanol is antidot. So again, your chances to severely poison yourself not much higher than if you instead of alcohol were doing Japanese cuisine.
It's a lot easier to deal with a small grease fire than vaporized ethanol around an open flame.
> Ethanol is antidot. So again, your chances to severely poison yourself not much higher than if you instead of alcohol were doing Japanese cuisine.
Uh huh that's why all people blinded by bad moonshine are living healthy with full eyesight and no other negative affects, just like people that ate some bad fish
Grease fires in comparison were one of the leading causes of house fires in the US the last time I checked. The worst case is getting splattered by burning droplets of oil that instantly scald any exposed skin while continuing to burn for long enough to light your clothing on fire. Personally I try to avoid pan frying on a range (as opposed to a dedicated appliance) and if I do I'm careful to verify the location of my fire blanket before starting.
In the U.S., heroin, LSD, and marijuana are the same federal schedule. Have to fill the for-profit prison labor camps somehow, and admitting dealing marijuana isn’t as dangerous as dealing heroin would put a dent in that. Leave that to the corporate opioid peddlers legally addicting Americans in pain.
https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-fda-failure...
Washington as an unquestioned justification for anything should never be the argument.
Some people just enjoying have hobbies; distilling hooch isn't on my bingo card, but it being illegal in the era of "we swear it's definitely not sports betting" is silly.
But who am I to tell Chesterton where to put his fence. I guess every hundred years or so society needs to experience the thing for itself all over again.