Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Posted: **Mon Apr 29, 2013 11:17 pm**

So, I am watching a documentary about how "cheap" methanol is... so that bar owners in india and bali are adding it to their drinks... and people die, get liver failures and lose their eyesight...

am I wrong or is it simply someone who doesn't know how to distill, and remove fores... rather than profiteering?

I am putting this into safety discussion because I wonder about the safety of the standard "remove 100ml from the beginning of your run" ... even though I remove all "smelly" cuts from the beginning of the run and put them back in on the next run... I still wonder about the safety.

Posted: **Mon Apr 29, 2013 11:23 pm**

No they add it to otherwise crap but kinda safe liquor. its likely wood alcohol and yeah bad news :handgestures-thumbdown: , btw there wouldn't be any cuts done

Posted: **Mon Apr 29, 2013 11:28 pm**

I think you will find they are literally adding metholated spirits to it. I dont think drinking everything put out will be that bad from a few drink. Sure after a few days maybe but 2-3 drink nar.

Like in the drug scene they cut it with ajax and other shit to make the hit feel bigger but its not its the chemicals in the shit they cut it with. Your best of drinking beer if you go to places like that you will know if they add metho to beer lol

I dont thing its right but they are not right there. I know of a guy riding a moped in bali that got ran over by a military truck and they did not stop and he had to get flown back to australia on the first flight as there hospitals you go there to die pretty much. He can barely walk now but the fact the military hit him and dont give a shit says something

Posted: **Mon Apr 29, 2013 11:35 pm**

Best not to recycle the fores. Cut them out and remove them.

Some contention exists as to weather it sends you blind. The bali episodes and the indian ones let you know its not to be mucked arround with. Err on the side of caution.

When you reach 100 years old, you might be able to say you threw some good grog out, or go blind at an early age and go down as a statistic. Each to their own.

Besides, the same phisics that make it possible to distill also dictate other compounds will come off at a different tempretures, hence the foreshots and the tails.

Posted: **Mon Apr 29, 2013 11:39 pm**

I am not saying not to make cuts I discard 250ml in each strip and spirit run. I don a run on sunday and got about 9-10lts of feints and 4.5lts of keep at 65% as I didnt like what came out.

Made heads cut and tails I had no smell in any of it so cut it to taste and cut alot out as I hate the tails taste.

I figure it cheap to make 90lts of wash and run it so 4.5lts of keep @ 65% isnt to bad although that isnt a good yield for me

Posted: **Mon Apr 29, 2013 11:59 pm**

reckon if half the members here seen me doing cuts they'd cry, but it's been a hell of a long time since I been crook from the grog.

if in doubt, cut it out ;-)

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 12:25 am**

Pretty merciless with my initial cuts but i do sometimes back blend some tails for flavor, yet to get a hangover attributed to my own spirits :handgestures-thumbupleft:

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 12:32 am**

Foreshots, no.
heads = hangover, you soon learn the cut there.
tails, if you like it, put it in, if not leave it out, that one is personal.

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 5:25 am**

Methanol is used to make biodiesel that is probably why it is so easy to obtain in these countries and only a small amount is needed to be fatal less then 30 ml.

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 12:00 pm**

I've started thinking that there isn't a whole lot of methanol in the washes I usually do (rum and TPW), mainly heaps of acetone. The foreshots smell is pretty distinctly nail polish remover. A few weeks ago I had the unique experience of taking a deep whiff of what I'm pretty sure was methanol (from ByB's apricot wash), it's a fairly different smell and leaves you feeling like someone just whacked you over the head with something hefty.

I always remind myself that the worst spirit you can get from not taking any cuts has the same ethanol:methanol:acetone proportion as a beer or wine (assuming you're wash was from barley or grapes and that you mix all of the spirit together). Distillation only separates components, it doesn't add extra methanol or acetone. That being said, it's much nicer if you always take good cuts. For my still I can't smell any heads at all past the first 150mL.

From what I understand, the poisoning comes from either just drinking foreshots, or from adding paint thinner.

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 12:24 pm**

On HD they list the minimum lethal dose of methanol at 100ml...

On this site HERE, they report it anywhere as low as 25ml:

Question: Just how dangerous is methanol?

Fact: Methanol is a poisonous chemical that can blind you or kill you, and as well as drinking it you can absorb it through the skin and breathe in the fumes.

Question: How much does it take to kill you?

Short answer: Anything from five teaspoons to more than half a pint, but nobody really knows.

Fact: Human susceptibility to the acute effects of methanol intoxication is extremely variable. The minimum dose of methanol causing permanent visual defects is unknown. The lethal dose of methanol for humans is not known for certain. The minimum lethal dose of methanol in the absence of medical treatment is put at between 0.3 and 1 g/kg.

That means it's thought to take at least 20 grams of methanol to kill an average-sized person, or 25 ml, five teaspoonsful. Or it might need more than three times as much, 66 grams, 17 teaspoonsful, or maybe more, and even then it'll only kill you if you can't reach a doctor within a day or two, and maybe it still won't kill you.

But it definitely can kill you. If you drink five teaspoonsful of pure methanol you'll need medical treatment even if it doesn't kill you. Yet people have survived doses of 10 times as much -- a quarter of a litre, half a pint -- without any permanent harm. But others haven't survived much lower doses. Getting rapid medical attention is crucial, though the poisoning effects can be slow to develop.

Authorities advise that swallowing up to 1.3 grams or 1.7 ml of methanol or inhaling methanol vapour concentrations below 200 ppm should be harmless for most people. No severe effects have been reported in humans of methanol vapour exposures well above 200 ppm.

Out of 1,601 methanol poisonings reported in the US in 1987 the death rate was 0.375%, or 1 in 267 cases. It might have been only 1 in more than a thousand cases because most cases weren't reported. Most cases were caused by drinking badly made moonshine, which is a worldwide problem.

Fact: 30 litres of fruit juice will probably contain up to 20 grams of methanol, near the official minimum lethal dose. Methanol is in the food we eat, in fresh fruit and vegetables, beer and wine, diet drinks, artificial sweeteners.

Not only that, methanol occurs naturally in humans. It's a natural component of blood, urine, saliva and the air you breathe out. It's there anyway even if you've never been exposed to chemical methanol or its fumes.

Methanol is eliminated from the body as a normal matter of course via the urine and exhaled air and by metabolism. Getting rid of it takes from a few hours for low doses to a day or two for higher doses. Some proportion of a dose of methanol just goes straight through, excreted by the lungs and kidneys unchanged. The normal background-level quantities of methanol in humans are eliminated and replenished all the time as a matter of course.

Either way, it can make you very sick in small quantities :puke-huge:

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 2:36 pm**

I think regardless of how much methanol it takes to harm you and weather there is enough in your wash to make you sick/blind, your still gonna chuck it. AFAIK heads make your spirits taste crap and cause hangovers so your not gonna want them in your drink weather they contain methanol or not.

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 6:35 pm**

I started making biodiesel so bought a 20 ltr drum of 99.8 % Motor racing purity methanol .the biodiesel worked out ok but now i still have 17 ltrs of explosive poison in my shed :scared-eek: . any one want it.

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 6:46 pm**

1 2many wrote:I started making biodiesel so bought a 20 ltr drum of 99.8 % Motor racing purity methanol .the biodiesel worked out ok but now i still have 17 ltrs of explosive poison in my shed :scared-eek: . any one want it.

Chuck it in the For Sale section :shifty:

Or give it to your mother-in-law :teasing-neener:

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 6:55 pm**

Brendan wrote:
1 2many wrote:I started making biodiesel so bought a 20 ltr drum of 99.8 % Motor racing purity methanol .the biodiesel worked out ok but now i still have 17 ltrs of explosive poison in my shed :scared-eek: . any one want it.

Chuck it in the For Sale section :shifty:

Or give it to your mother-in-law :teasing-neener:

hmm :think: :think: Mother in law :music-deathmetal:

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 7:08 pm**

I believe very little methanol is actually produced in the fermentation processes that we typically do. Fermenting fruit produces a higher percentage, but still not a great deal. I have done a fair bit of reading up on methanol due to my fear of the unknown and lack of information causing me to abandon the first pot still I built.

The cases of methanol poisoning have been numerous but all have been deliberate adding of methanol to perfectly safe to drink ethanol.
Back in the moonshine bootleg days of prohibition, methanol was deliberately added to ethanol alcohol to "denature" it (poison it).
This was done to discourage people from drinking it and to make it unsafe to do so; some people suffered blindness and others died from it.
Another interesting fact is that Methylated Spirits is not pure methanol, it is in fact mostly Ethanol which has methanol added to it to poison it for industrial use as opposed to drinking purposes... methanol added to ethanol spirit, thus Methyl-ated spirit.
In the USA this must be done for industrial spirits to avoid the excise taxes.

From my understanding, (and I don't pretend to be an expert) that even if you kept the entire run from your still and mixed it all together, there would not be enough methanol by percentage to cause any major health issues in the short term.
Of course I am not advocating people do that but I think there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about this issue.
The purpose of distillation is to separate out the components we do not want and collect the good stuff, so toss the first bit.

I hope these few little bits of info help somewhat, but don't take my word for it, go find out for yourself. Google is your friend, there is heaps of info just on Wikipedia, so if in doubt get busy reading.

Cheers,

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 9:19 pm**

1 2many wrote:I started making biodiesel so bought a 20 ltr drum of 99.8 % Motor racing purity methanol .the biodiesel worked out ok but now i still have 17 ltrs of explosive poison in my shed :scared-eek: . any one want it.

Quite a few people are using water/methanol injection in turbo diesel 4wd's now. If you want to get rid of it PM me your details and I can put some adds up on a couple of 4wd forums.

Posted: **Tue Apr 30, 2013 9:37 pm**

Howdy,

If you take the wine indsutry they are regulated to very low methanol levels...for good reason. They have some nice testing equipment to acurately measure which we lack. In the absense of proper measuring and regulation we're left with just caution and established work practices.

I guess my real concern is the treating of fruits we use the same way we do grains.

High pectin level fruits produce elevated methanol levels. Plums, grapes and apples being high pectin fruits. Apple is often cited as one of the worst offenders.

If your into these fruits may pay to do a spot of reading and review your cuts process.

bt1

Posted: **Mon May 19, 2014 10:50 pm**

If you buy Methylated Spirits in Supermarket or hardware and check the label you will find it says 95% Ethanol.
I believe they have taken out the 30% Methyl Alcohol & Pyredine ( colour/ bittering agent) so the meth drinkers don't poison themselves and the manufacturer doesn't get hit with a manslaughter charge. :teasing-tease:

Posted: **Mon May 19, 2014 10:57 pm**

Technofreax wrote:If you buy Methylated Spirits in Supermarket or hardware and check the label you will find it says 95% Ethanol.
I believe they have taken out the 30% Methyl Alcohol & Pyredine ( colour/ bittering agent) so the meth drinkers don't poison themselves and the manufacturer doesn't get hit with a manslaughter charge. :teasing-tease:

You can drink that shit if you want :wtf:

It's also customary to drop in at the welcome centre to introduce yourself for your first post ;-)

Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

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