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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

It's reasonably hard to poison yourself (other than, you know, alcohol) with fermentation. We've been doing it for thousands of years without specialized equipment or training, and the first batches were probably accidental.

It is rather tricky to distill liquor and NOT poison whoever drinks it. Especially on home or poorly maintained equipment.

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This is a bit misleading. While it is possible for distilled spirits to contain methanol, it's generally in very low amounts and removable. Often unless specific ingredients are used, it's not even much of a concern. And funny enough, ethanol itself is a competitive inhibitor for methanol and is an antidote of sorts for methanol ingestion. Most anecdotal stories around poisonous spirits are scare tactics and due to other more serious issues such as prohibition-era bootleggers using car radiators with leaded solder, adding adulterating chemicals to stretch profits, etc.

I'd say that it is actually fairly easy to poison oneself brewing different kinds of alcohols. It is a risky activity. So is driving. So is making fireworks. So is chemistry. So is making cheese, pickles, sauerkraut, and canned goods. People die of botulism every year because they don't follow basic safety procedures when canning, or they eat canned goods that someone else improperly prepared.

That doesn't mean that one shouldn't be allowed to do these things. It means that we should provide appropriate training and, in some jurisdictions, reasonable / non-discriminatory licensing for those who wish to do these things.

When it comes to distillation, the rules are pretty straight-forward:

Keep a log book. Use quality equipment. Measure temperatures. Learn to discard heads and tails. Use appropriate ventilation and fire safety protocols. Purchase qualitative test equipment to verify that the product does not contain harmful contaminants. Licensing is a great way to ensure that people know about these things and follow them. A blanket ban actually makes it more likely that people who violate this ban to distill alcohol will poison themselves or others.

>It is rather tricky to distill liquor and NOT poison whoever drinks it

sure is news for all the east europeans out there distilling their own rakija

bollocks. the methanol exists in tiny quantities and has the lowest boiling point of basically anything in your booze. 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.

if you're getting poisoned from a home distillation you probably shouldn't be allowed to drive a car or use open flames.

I mean, we're talking about drunks here.

Asking an alcoholic to pour out any kind of liquor is mind-bending to many of them.

Look, you and I both know that it is literal poison, but, again, it's lushes we're talking about.

0.5% is already too technical a term here. What is that in glasses or drams? What do you mean you can't convert pints to percentages? What commie bullshit is a millyliter? Fuck you, I'm getting hammered for cheap!

If you can get a meme going to always piss on your first pint in the toilet, then maybe, just maybe you can get it to work.

And, yeah, a lot of drunks are no longer allowed to drive cars and really should not while drinking too. Doesn't mean they don't do it though.

As I understand it, tossing the heads doesn't do much for removing methanol. It gets rid of some other unpleasant compounds though.

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