In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.

Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.

Anything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe.

I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.

This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.

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.

> This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.

Please do find those papers! They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with.

To be clear - methanol boils at 64C and ethanol boils at 78C. Are you suggesting that in standard distillation, there is still some non-trace methanol coming over at 78C? If I personally observed that in a laboratory setting, I'd quickly assume measurement error or external contamination.

I suspect that the vapor of the mash is always a mix of the components, and even above the boiling point of methanol, it still produces a mixed vapor. At room temperature, all of the components produce some vapor and will evaporate. This continues as the temperature rises.

It's not clear to me that simple distillation of a methanol/ethanol mixture can produce either pure ethanol or pure methanol at any point, just as it's impossible to distill ethanol and water to pure ethanol (absolute alcohol) if the water is above a small percentage of the mixture.