A U.S. appeals court on Friday declared unconstitutional a nearly 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling, calling it an unnecessary and improper means for Congress to exercise its power to tax.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in favor of the nonprofit Hobby Distillers Association and four of its 1,300 members.
They argued that people should be free to distill spirits at home, whether as a hobby or for personal consumption including, in one instance, to create an apple-pie-vodka recipe.
The ban was part of a law passed during Reconstruction in July 1868, in part to thwart liquor tax evasion, and subjected violators to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
For those pearl-clutching about fire and explosion safety, you don’t need anything more than a bucket and a really cold few days to distill alcohol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_freezing
Things like ice beer and applejack are made this way and were presumably banned as well
Now you can resume pearl-clutching about methanol and fusel alcohols
I’m seeing a lot of misinformation in this thread. Stills don’t “blow up”. That was a myth perpetuated by law enforcement in the same spirit that smoking pot will make you go crazy. Making soup in a pressure cooker is far more dangerous than using a still. Distilling liquor is done at atmospheric pressure, no part of the equipment is ever under pressure.
You don’t need initial pressure to have an explosion. Flammable vapors in a confined space, even at low pressure, can explode if ignited.
If it exceeds a particular vapor pressure, the ethanol fumes become too rich to explode, just like any other explosive vapor. The high vapor pressures of a still wouldn’t lend themselves well to exploding. Fires, sure. But unless you’re distilling over an open flame and something horribly wrong happens with your still, it’s not very likely to burst into flames. Most small scale hobbyist stills are electric nowadays
The setup in the video is not a still. It’s a device designed specifically to create an explosion. You could replace the ethanol with hairspray, WD-40, butane from a lighter, gasoline, nail polish remover, or any number of household items to achieve the same effect.
Didn’t you hear? Dick says that’s all a myth, a ruse by the government to get more taxes… to do evil things like build roads schools and hospitals! This video is propaganda!
I envy the Canadian lemmings whose tax money is being used to build roads, schools, and hospitals 😫
False. My great grandpa was a bootlegger. There are and we’re explosions and fires making hooch.
Home distilling is significantly different than bootlegging. The biggest batch that I start with is 5 gallons. Bootleggers were working with commercial quantities.
Yeah, making moonshine was a rural pastime in my country for ages, even when it was illegal, and the most danger from it that I’ve heard of is that the result smells and tastes pretty damn nasty.
Wikipedia says:
Alcohol concentrations at higher strengths (the GHS identifies concentrations above 24% ABV as dangerous) are flammable and therefore dangerous to handle. This is especially true during the distilling process, when vaporized alcohol may accumulate in the air to dangerous concentrations if adequate ventilation is not provided.
This sounds like it requires the air to taste like fortified wine.
Hold my beer, I’m about to hot-box the distilling room.
Yes, you can vape alcohol. No, you really shouldn’t, because if you get too drunk off it you can’t throw up or have your stomach pumped.
Distilling in an enclosed space over open flames can result in flare-ups. This can obviously be prevented with adequate ventilation and/or using an electric heating element, but that doesn’t guarantee everyone who tries it will have the requisite knowledge to do so safely.
Doesn’t mean it should be illegal, but like, if you’re gonna try a potentially dangerous hobby, you know, like, read about it first? Distilling in ignorance can result in higher concentrations of fusel oils, methyls, and isopropyls, which can be toxic or even deadly. Hence the old “bathtub hooch makes you go blind” trope. Learn how to separate the heads and tails properly, or don’t do it at all.
So it’s not like the only danger is fires and explosions. It should definitely require a license to do commercially, but hobbyists should still do their due diligence to ensure safety.
Man, a lot of people here just repeating the same old myths and police lines about moonshine making you blind and stills exploding. Not to be that guy but do some research.
Methanol poisoning is hugely overstated, sugar and grain mash don’t produce enough for it to be dangerous. Fruit mash can, but it’s easy to mitigate. Most cases of methanol poisoning are either the person purposefully drinking methanol or from alcohol that’s been adulterated with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_incidents
Stills can start fires, if improperly operated, but so can gas hobs and we’re not calling for a license to operate those. You really need to be making industrial quantities at pressure for it to explode. Looking at it as a cause of fires in countries where it’s legal indicate that it’s a non-issue. If you’re worried about forest fires, don’t make it so people need to hide in the woods and they’ll do it at home.
The way i learned it is that it is blueacid that can poison you. That would usually kill you but when the concentration is so low it leads to blindness or you turning into a vegetable.
Can happen only if you ferment/distill fruits that contain kernels because thats where a high concentration exists. Especially strong in lemons and oranges (citrusfruits).
Basically, you could remove the kernels before distilling and you will probably never have an issue with said substance.
Another fun fact: If you create a strong absinth you can abort a child when the pregnancy is very early. Its still wiser to consult a specialist tho. Im talking about a 85-90 Vol.% absinth and a high amount relative to ones bloodamount.
It should be noted that it was the US government who intentionally poisoned the alcohol supply during prohibition. The people that attempted to drink this poisoned alcohol were the ones suffering of blindness and other complications.
Ah, an American classic. Sabotage a good thing, and then use an isolated incident to instill a hundred years worth of fear.
The danger comes from the distilling, which concentrates the miniscule methanol to dangerous levels. When I learned distilling, I was taught to throw away the first half cup or so to reduce methanol. In reality, methanol has a lower boiling point than ethanol, so you get mostly methanol in that first few shots due to the still warming up, but overall it’s negligible. In a well controlled environment, it’s technically possible to separate the two via this fractional distillation, but it’s not something those early moonshiners really knew about.
In summary, I see home distillation in the same light as picking wild mushrooms: you really have to know what you’re doing. As always, regulation and education is the answer here.
Also methanol tastes nasty. You don’t want it in your shine. Nobody is going drink enough of it to cause harm.
Except that literally happened when the US government poisoned the supplies. Just like we did with paraquat to weed, and a million other examples.
Y’all know the risk of home distillers blinding themselves via methanol poisoning is way higher than the risk of them blowing themselves up, right?
Not really, it’s the exact opposite. There isn’t any more methanol in small scale shine than there is in homebrew beer. The risk is if you make a large enough batch that you can get a full bottle of just heads, and then decide to drink that for whatever reason. But even at moderate scales, that’s not going to happen.
Yeah, but an explosion would be incredibly rare, too. So rare that I think even the “get a full bottle of just heads and then decide to drink that for whatever reason” would still manage to be more likely.
Only if you use fruits. Grain or sugar has very little methanol when fermented
You know the treatment for methanol poisoning is ethanol? As long as you’re tossing the fore shots and not putting them into a sour mash you’re fine.
That’s actually a myth, grain and sugar mash produce very little methanol, way below the harmful amount. Fruit mash can produce harmful amounts, but can be easily mitigated. Most cases of methanol poisoning are from people purposefully consuming it or from alcohol that has been adulterated with methanol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_incidents
Nothing is going to change, there won’t be any more stills blowing up in the future than there have in the past.
People who wanted to do this were already doing it. This just makes it legal. I doubt there were too many out there that wanted to, but we’re holding off because of the law, and now they can indulge.
Exactly. People are already out there distilling. This will help open up discussion and education about home distilling making it even safer. Is good.
I feel this ruling is going to have explosive results.
For blindingly obvious reasons.
The comments in this thread make it sound like it’s super dangerous, its not and you have to fuck up so much to blind yourself or blow up.
I wouldnt be so sure about it because i read contradicting information already in this thread on how this blindness exactly occurs.
iirc methanol and acetone both have a boiling point much lower than ethanol, so I think one would learn really quickly to discard the first little bit of distilled product, because it’d be nasty as hell. I never tried distilling but the issue seems like it’d fix itself, right?
Tips and tails. Tips for the methanol, tails for the nasty heavy stuff
I’ve blown myself up 4 time and am blind now.
Yeah. The main reasons why it doesn’t blow up, is that it stinks so hard you can’t possibly ignore it and you have to ensure good ventilation.
The main reason why you won’t go blind is because the antidote for methanol is ethanol.
When you hear about methanol poisoning causing blindness it’s usually some morons drinking purified methanol.
K, now make any and all drugs legal
Can’t read the Epstein Files if you’re blind from methanol poisoning, remember to collect your tips and tails folks!
And share those tips and tails later in the night.
So long as they’re doing it for personal use and being safe enough to not blow up the neighborhood, I don’t care. If they wanna sell for others to consume then obviously that’s a whole other thing.
It’s the “being safe enough” part that’s the problem. How do you regulate that? Do you really believe that the average American is capable of operating something as dangerous as a still in a completely safe manner?
If we were talking about homebrewing, yeah, absolutely, that shit is awesome and there is no good argument against. Home distilling is basically building a bomb and hoping that it doesn’t go off before you get wrecked enough on moonshine to notice it happening.
I have a neighbor who parks his stupid Cybertruck in his garage every day. Google “Tesla explosion”. Another neighbor has a Toyota overland build truck, he has an exposed 5 gallon propane tank on the back and 20 gallons of fuel tanks on the sides, it just sits there waiting to detonate. Google “Home gas explosion”. Another neighbor puts his Giant Turkey fryer on his balcony and frys a huge turkey every thanksgiving. Google “Turkey fryer explosion”. The old guy across from me home builds black powder rifles as a hobby. He has at least a 50 pounds of black powder stored in his workshop. Google “Black powder explosion”. The kids get picked up in a school bus with 100 gallons of CNG on it. Google "CNG explosion ". The 7-11 at the end of the block has an open cage filled with propane tanks, many returns that may not have the current safety valves on them. Minimum wage employees are in charge of this and the local crackheads stand right by it, smoking cigarettes. Google “propane tank explosion”. Most of the houses in my neighborhood were built 40-50 years ago, they all have water heaters. Many have no Tpr valve, improper venting, ect. Google “water heater explosion”. I guess you might be right, we need way more laws and regulations to protect us from from the bombs all around us.
Let me guess one of your neighbours worked in a mine and still has 5 crates of dynamite that he uses as a chair where he smokes on? 😂😂
How do you regulate that?
Create safety standards for small commercially manufactured stills. Most people are lazy, so those will significantly outnumber more sketchy DIY stuff. We have safety standards for other dangerous items like propane tanks, and they reduce the risk to a level most people find acceptable.
in a completely safe manner
There is no such thing. There’s a level of risk society finds acceptable. If a still can be as safe as a propane grill, I’m happy.
And if it could be as safe as a propane grill I would have no objections. But those things are orders of magnitude apart in terms of relative safety levels.
Do you have a source for that claim? I found this source suggesting otherwise; in New Zealand, where home distilling is legal and there wouldn’t be a reason to hide it, less than 0.14% of residential fires were caused by home distilling.
That’s honestly worse than I thought.
If you’re confused then this is a great object lesson in how to read statistics. Consider how many people actually own a home still in New Zealand. It’s not going to be a lot. Realistically, I think 1 in 10,000 would be a high estimate. That is to say, about 0.01% of the population. I’ve not had any luck finding actual numbers on that despite my best efforts, but I think it’s a fair assumption given the amount of specialised equipment involved in home distilling (much more so than home brewing), as well as the space needed to set it up and the time required for the for process. It’s not exactly set it and and forget it. In comparison, the percentage of people who live in a home who have a stove is going to be fairly close to 100%.
Already you can see the issue right? If 0.01% of a population are causing 0.14% of all home fires… That’s insanely bad.
But it gets worse. That study covers a 20 year period, but home distilling was only legal for the last 10 years of that period. Which means a couple of things. Firstly the number of home distillers would likely have been even lower for most of the period covered by the study. Home distilling would only really have taken off as a hobby over those last ten years, and for much of that time equipment would likely have been hard to come by; that’s not the sort of thing where import / manufacturing and distribution are going to be easy to just set up overnight. Secondly, home distilling as a cause of fire was likely under-reported for those first ten years as people would have a strong incentive to hide the cause of the incident. By far the single biggest category of equipment listed in the study is “Not recorded” accounting for more than all the other categories combined. Obviously, there’s going to be a distribution of all the other equipment types throughout that “Not recorded” block, but it’s not all unlikely that the “Not recorded” stats for illegal home stills would be at least slightly higher than for most other equipment.
Then there’s a second factor to consider; frequency of use. People often cook on a stove at least once a day. In comparison I very much doubt the average home distiller is running their still every single day. It’s a time consuming process that requires a fair amount of attention. Generally you’re going to make a batch and then consume that batch until you eventually need to make another. If we were to normalize not only for frequency of ownership but also frequency of use, it’s not hard to arrive at a fair estimate that home stills are causing fires at a rate of several hundred times that of, say, the average gas stove, based on the numbers in that study. Obviously I’m being pretty loose here, but I’m just trying to illustrate the general point. I’m not claiming to be presenting hard data here, I’d have to really sit down with the raw numbers and run a proper normalization, as well as get some stats not accounted for in that study, but yeah, overall, I’m feeling very good about my “orders of magnitude” estimate if the numbers you’re presenting are accurate.
(Also, it probably goes without saying that getting your statistics on how dangerous making moonshine is from a webpage entitled “Making Moonshine is Safer Than You Think” maybe isn’t the best idea. I’m fairly sure pedophiles also have strong opinions about the relative safety of taking candy from people in unmarked vans.)
My grandma did it for decades and didn’t blow anyone up. Nobody went blind either. You make it sound like it’s making a McNuke in your kitchen
Yeah man, its not that hard to do. I remain unexploded having cobbled together my “still”.
My great uncle Joe survived the entirety of WW2 despite being thrown into some of the worst fighting imaginable. This proves that war is completely safe for everyone involved.
I get the n=1 argument, but there are many people who have successfully done it safely. The government’s job is just to make sure the equipment you buy is safe enough, not to protect you from every dangerous choice in life
You know freedom means you can blow yourself up… not everyone lives in an apartment complex
looks at instant pot
Y-you know…
I see a moonshine arisin
Wait, in the land of the free home distilling is illegal?
Not really, we have “laws” and as long as you weren’t making money no one cared , we have TV shows of people in a competition with home distilleries, this is basically just fixing a outdated bullshit law from 158 years ago
Yup. But nobody follows the law.
Land of the free, but in a “Democratic People’s Republic” kind of way.
Wait, the 5th circuit did something that isnt evil? What’s the catch?
Appalachian Roulette: You have to drink a shot of potentially poisoned moonshine every time a mountain daughter is impregnated by her father.
Thats not roulette its just suicide.
5th Circuit
It’s nice to know how to feel about a ruling before you even read the actual opinion.
This is the rare occasion where they actually got a ruling right, for once.
Ugh, fine I’ll read it.
Uh oh, I guess I should too, then. I was just going by the headline, but I realize that it’s possible that the court came to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.
My dad makes what I would describe as moonshine or vodka or something like that every year at home. We’re in the EU though. I always found it odd it’s illegal in the US
It’s illegal in the UK too.
That said, so long as you’re not selling it no one really cares
Which is odd because you can make as much beer and wine as you like.
Kinda hard to legislate against that
if you leave pretty much any sugar rich liquid alone it will find a way to turn its self to alcohol
If you do it wrong, or drink the wrong part of the finished product, you can go blind. So I get why regulation may be needed.
Except that was never the reason it was illegal, really. The government just wanted their tax money.
If we’re banning it for safety reasons, we need to ban a lot more activities. have you seen what happens if people use a table saw or pool improperly? Even stairs are probably more dangerous than home distilling
