So I'm watching Boardwalk Empire and everyone's got a still in their house/apartment making moonshine. Other than drinking the stuff, how do you know whether you've brewed ethanol or toxic methanol?
So I'm watching Boardwalk Empire and everyone's got a still in their house/apartment making moonshine. Other than drinking the stuff, how do you know whether you've brewed ethanol or toxic methanol?
In reply to stroker: Have someone else sample it?
Doesn't it have to do with what you started with?
My understanding is that you can start with grain (or corn) and if you screw it up you can brew toxic methanol in error.
When you distill something normally the heads and tails are the nasty stuff from a run.
Here is a decent article on the subject in regards to Moonshining
http://www.clawhammersupply.com/blogs/moonshine-still-blog/7207958-methanol-will-moonshine-make-you-blind
When you start to get spirits from your still they'll have a very distinctive "acetone" smell to it. This is your heads and is not stuff you want to drink. It also has a lower boiling temperature if you have the ability to monitor such things.
As your still continues running the heads will start to be less and less until your product is mostly ethanol. This should smell like vodka (assuming reflux or similar type of still). This is the stuff you keep, water down, flavor, and drink.
As you begin to cook all the alcohol out of your mash you'll see less and less alcohol content in what's coming out of your still and it'll start to taste like wet cardboard. This is your tails.
If you mix your heads and tails you get "feints". If you pour your feints into your next batch you can enrich the alcohol content of your mash and make your runs more "efficient". (or you can just do a "feints run)
Odd thing to consider: When you make your mash, you're essentially making beer or wine. You didn't add anything to that beer or wine to make that acetone/methanol stuff that comes out first. That means when you drink beer/wine you're drinking that acetone/methanol stuff (in much thinner dilutions of course).
Fun stuff to think about
Sounds like a lot of ways to kill yourself without knowing it.
Nah. It's another one of those things that gets a bad rap from idiots.
New Zealand legalized home distilling and has had (from what I hear) exactly zero home distilling related accidents.
Stills are for sale in grocery stores and hardware stores in Hungary and they could probably report the same accident rate. I can say that I sampled my fair share of House Palinka and never had a bad experience.
Your biggest areas of concern are construction materials, and idiots who will do anything to make more profit off their brew.
They both show up in your mash.
Methanol - boiling point = 148.5°F, comes out first when you're ramping up in temp. That's why you toss the first part as it'll have you're highest concentration of methanol. If you can monitor your temps you wanna throw out everything till you've cooked off the methanol in the batch.
Ethanol - boiling point = 173.07°F, what you're trying to capture, will start to come out next
Water - boiling point = 212°F, don't want too much as it'll dilute your batch
Basically if you keep things cooking between 173-212°F, you'll get a product that is mostly ethanol and less % water. There's other stuff that shows up but it'd be a product of what materials are in your mash/still set up.
Hungary Bill covered the science of it pretty well. The history is the nasty part. Back during prohibition it was found a lot of industrial ethanol was being diverted into the black market for drinking alcohol. So the US government, in their infinite wisdom, decided to start poisoning the ethanol, with methanol and other poisonous substances. This killed thousands of people.
The primary danger from actual moonshine was lead content from using old car radiators as condensers.
This place knows everything about everything.
Would it be worth it (and legal somehow) to brew your own E85?
Worth it? I don't have a couple tons of corn around so probably not.
It can be done legally though, if I remember right from looking at it a couple years ago. Something to do with registering the still, denaturing the alcohol, etc to make it a biofuel only so it's only for the car and not the driver.
In reply to Gearheadotaku:
It is legal, probably not financially worth it.
the Department of the Treasury came up with a simplified application for an Alcohol Fuel Producer permit (Form 5110.74), which designates a small producer as one who can make up to 10,000 proof-gallons of fuel per year. (A proof gallon is one liquid gallon of spirits that is 50 percent alcohol at 60 degrees Fahrenheit.) That’s enough to manufacture 5,263 gallons of 190-proof ethanol fuel. Each state has its own permit requirements, generally modeled after the federal rules.
Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/make-your-own-fuel-zmaz10amzraw.aspx#ixzz3NguNYcsR
In reply to Gearheadotaku:
State laws vary, but the application with the TTB is free (it took me about 5-minutes to fill it out and requires a hand sketch of your property): http://www.ttb.gov/forms/f511074.pdf
In Washington you can make your own fuel alcohol and it does not need to be "denatured" unless it leaves your property. Denatured typically means it contains at least 2% kerosene or unleaded fuel (so E85 would be legal).
My TTB Fuel Alcohol Production Plant application is currently "in review" and has been for about a month (blame the holidays?). I spoke with a lady on the phone who needed a few clarifications and over all she sounded pretty positive about my approval. We'll see what comes in the mail.
Is it financially "worth it"? Nah, it's just a hobby. Maybe I'll try to convert my lawnmower to run on the hooch I make or something fun like that. Really my pipe dream is that we'll generate enough support for hobby distillers in the hopes that it will some day be legal to make your own liquor (kind of like the "next step" in beer and wine brewing).
Good times
Hungary Bill wrote: That means when you drink beer/wine you're drinking that acetone/methanol stuff (in much thinner dilutions of course).
Whiskey: It's healthier than beer.
Good to know!
Hungary Bill wrote: When you start to get spirits from your still they'll have a very distinctive "acetone" smell to it. This is your heads and is not stuff you want to drink. It also has a lower boiling temperature if you have the ability to monitor such things. As your still continues running the heads will start to be less and less until your product is mostly ethanol. This should smell like vodka (assuming reflux or similar type of still). This is the stuff you keep, water down, flavor, and drink. As you begin to cook all the alcohol out of your mash you'll see less and less alcohol content in what's coming out of your still and it'll start to taste like wet cardboard. This is your tails. If you mix your heads and tails you get "feints". If you pour your feints into your next batch you can enrich the alcohol content of your mash and make your runs more "efficient". (or you can just do a "feints run) Odd thing to consider: When you make your mash, you're essentially making beer or wine. You didn't add anything to that beer or wine to make that acetone/methanol stuff that comes out first. That means when you drink beer/wine you're drinking that acetone/methanol stuff (in much thinner dilutions of course). Fun stuff to think about
Hell of an argument for drinking straight shine! I'll see it that argument gets the old lady off the red wine!
Supposedly pure ethanol (vodka) watered down to a drink able level wont give you a hangover. Never tried it myself, but I can tell you that during my stay in Hungary my brother made me a batch of rye that was smoother than anything I'd ever bought in a shop (and I've bought my fair share of expensive booze). We aged it in a sonic cleaner for a day or so and that really took the "bite" off. It still had that "rye" flavor, but it went down like honey. I found myself pretty hammered before I really wanted to be.
The next day I could hardly tell I'd been drinking.
(but in all fairness, I drank plenty of hooch out there that would make a diesel engine choke)
In reply to Hungary Bill:
Good rum treats my wife and I the same.
(Have a great Don Q Gran Anjeo in front of me)
and as if on cue, my permit for my alcohol plant arrived in the mail today. 
I can legally own and operate a still in my garage (to make fuel of course)
Here is another interesting point. Prohibition had nothing to do with drinking alcohol. Henry Ford designed all of his cars to run on Ethanol and called it "the fuel of the future." The oil barons lobbied up and whipped tea-totallers into a frenzy about how bad drinking is to get the people behind it. Therefore, no distiling, and Ford had to find a different fuel for his cars.
A quote from blogspot:
So if alcohol can provide a cheaper and better fuel than alcohol, why doesn't anyone talk about it today? Well, John D. Rockefeller, under the ruse of Christian temperance, gave 4 million dollars to a group of old ladies and told them to fight for Prohibition (they successfully used the money to buy off Congress). Why? Rockefeller owned Standard Oil, the main company pushing gas as an alternative fuel to alcohol. By getting Congress to pass Prohibition laws, Rockefeller eliminated his competition.
So other than the smell how can you tell what you're brewing is "head", "tail" or something else?
If you can see your mash's temp change in the still, that's one way. Per John's post, methanol evaporates at 148.5 deg, where as ethanol is 173 deg. Most of the time I don't see the change, it's easiest to just throw off (I threw away roughly .2 liter of alcohol for every 10 liters of mash in my old pot still (Hungary). It's been my experience that, while methanol is an optic nerve poison, our fear of it is a bit more... (I had a drink and cant think of the word...) amplified(?) than it really needs to be. You don't need to get "all" the methanol out of your spirits (I'm absolutely positive there is methanol in the liquor we buy), you just need to get the "most of it" out. With a pot still methanol stays in your product much longer than in a reflux (read that as: in your whiskey and rum there is more methanol than in your vodka and gin). People who brew for a profit (professionals included) will stop "throwing off" far sooner than you would if you were making whiskey/run/vodka/gin, they need as much product per run as possible. (Remember: Professionals are regulated by law, moonshiners aren't).
There was an american machinist in Hungary who ran his pot still from beginning to 20%abv and mixed it all together. It tasted like absolute crap and the guy is an idiot, but he's still alive.
If it's something that really interests you, these guys have a crap-ton of info (and seem really nice): http://homedistiller.org/intro/methanol
they also have a bit of a (slow) forum. The forum link is kind of hidden but if you look under the title line of links it's a second-row center.
Cheers!
Forgot: for the "tails" you just watch your hydrometer. No harm there, it just tastes like crap and probably wont help your hangovers.
In reply to stroker: My study of distallation says that monitoring the temp of the mash is the best way.
In NC, my wife and I can produce up to 200 gallons of wine or beer per year, but can't distill anything without a permit. The permit is only for commercial use.
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