mattmaroon

Your freezer’s self-defrost works by getting a little warm and then cold again. That causes ice crystals to melt and re-freeze, which is the opposite of what you want. Gums help with that and that’s why it’s in most of the ones you see at the grocery store.

They also can be used to give body to things that don’t have as much protein, like sorbets.

If you’re trying to get drunk cheaply, and without tasting liquor, you cannot beat the product and efficiency of a column still.

But I want my whiskey or apple brandy to have the characteristics of the mash I distill it from. A column still would reduce that.

So most home distilling is a pot still for sure.

I basically went from no real knowledge to being able to develop commercial-scale beverages and walk them through all phases of production.

The money’s not as good as software (but decent) and being active rather than sedentary with most of my time has done wonders for my health and mood. Man was not meant to sit in one place for long hours daily and I’m just not a gym rat no matter how many times I tried so I just reengineered my life.

If you can’t source it, I’m not going to tell you that you SHOULD pretend to be a bottling company and ask a gum provider to send you some free samples, but you could and the amount they send you will last the rest of your life. TIC gums is pretty awesome and if you’re into frozen desserts has some incredible gum mixtures for ice creams, sorbets, etc.

Also, consider just using water soluble flavor concentrates and skipping emulsification all together. That’s what most pros do and it’s why Sprite isn’t cloudy like it would be if you used oils. My favorite suppliers that sell in consumer and pro-sumer qtys are Apex Flavors and Nature’s Flavors.

This probably won’t work for Cola as I think some of those ingredients have all of their flavor molecules in the oils, but as a general rule, if you can buy it at the store and it is clear, it is made using water soluble. If it is brown it probably isn’t, hence the caramel color additive.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.3c00627

When you get into distilling you learn pretty fast that a lot of what you’ve been told about it is fake due to both deliberate propaganda, and the fact that a lot of it was learned before we had scientific tools to investigate deeper.

You would pretty much have to try to poison yourself distilling and yet everybody thinks it’s a real risk.

Being poisoned by a bootlegger who adds methanol because it’s cheaper (much like fentanyl in opiods) is not a fake risk, and a lot of people who think the first thing happened actually had the second thing happen.

And I’m certainly not criticizing people for this, I went to school for physics and yet was on the other side of this debate when I started distilling before I did research.

And even if you just distilled until it was basically water coming out, then re-blended everything, you have not significantly worsened the ratio of the two

It’s quite common for people to add methanol to illegal liquor because it can be made cheaply from natural gas and is sold industrially everywhere. You are much more likely to be injured buying bootleg alcohol than making it.

And, later on in distillation, when you’re much closer to the boiling point of water than ethanol, there will still be some ethanol coming out.

I get why you think that, I did too before diving deeper, but I assure you, your mental model of how distillation works is incorrect.

Then you get the heads, hearts, and tails and blend them together according to taste. You just wouldn’t get much separation if you distilled a small amount unless you were collecting in really tiny quantities.

So it just becomes harder to do a good job with a small amount.

Think of it this way: ethanol boils at 78.5. Water at 100. But when I’m distilling, the first stuff out of the still is coming out at like 80/20 ethanol to water, long before I’m near 100C. The later stuff still has some ethanol in it, even as I near 100C. (You can easily measure while distilling.)

So why would it be surprising that methanol behaved that way as well?

(Technically there actually isn’t temperature control in distilling, the temperature is just the boiling point of the mixture, which changes over time as the mixture changes from distillation, but you do control the heat input which effects the speed at which you distill. Tangential, but counterintuitive.)

The reason most don’t is just cost/practicality. You really need to have a fair bit of liquid to get good results. Like tenish gallons (~40L). You probably can’t fit a still that big on your stovetop (and you really want to do this outside anyway) and you’d need a 240v connection to provide enough heat. Your standard American wall outlet doesn’t provide enough juice.

But the standard 240v 50a you charge an EV with or, in my case, plug in your RV does. People run drier cords out a window too.

If Donald Trump had not run for President, or even had just been a normal President, or maybe even if he’d have done everything he did except for cause January 6, he absolutely would never have been prosecuted for this. The justice system was weaponized against him, even if he was actually guilty, which he surely was.

Methanol is really only present in significant amounts in fruit mashes because it comes from fermentation of pectin. Grain or sugar-derived alcohol barely has any at all.

The foreshots you throw out do have things that taste bad and which you would not want to drink much of, but even if you mixed it all back in and got drunk, it would be the same amount of all of those chemicals you’d get if you just drank the mash, which is itself basically just beer or wine.

We distillers are a lot more likely to burn our house down than any other form of injury.

The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor. The fire codes for a distillery are very strict.

Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them. The ratio of ethanol to methanol in a distilled spirit will be approximately the same as in the wash it was distilled from. Drinking brandy you’ll get about the same ratio as if you drank the wine it was made from.

You need the same amount of ethanol to get drunk regardless of how you drink it, all distilling does is get rid of that pesky water that’s in beer and wine. (That makes some other fun things like barrel aging possible.) So you’ll also get the same amount of methanol.

Also fun fact: if you got methanol poisoning and went to the hospital the treatment is ethanol, because it blocks the metabolism of methanol. Methanol metabolizes into formic acid which damages the optic nerve.

And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.

You’d have to try hard to seriously injure yourself drinking home distilled spirits. (I’ve been doing it for 15 years.) Unless you count just drinking too much, but you’d have that problem with the professional stuff too.

And he’s doing much worse now so that’s two.

Middle Eastern countries have much more condensed critical infrastructure and economic targets than we do.

Iran has expected a war like this for decades and been continuously preparing, most of the other nations they have not.

Or maybe it'll just implode. I hope not.