After like 3 years I was again brewing beer just for fun and not 2000l batch as my job or trying something on this small scale for my job (because I had a time and got the ingredients for free).
It is really experimental brew. I put 3,5l of grape juice (I think it is Veltlín variety) and will add some cherries there too. So let’s see how it will end up.
I hope your seeing eye dog will be as good a brewer as you were.
@finitebanjo methanol is dangerous only in high concentration, so distillates. This will be just OK. Beer, wine, mead, cider… just doesn’t have the problem there.
Also with distillation it is bad technology or somebody is just an idiot who doesn’t know what fractional distillation is.
Oh cool thanks so much for informing me about methanol, clearly I’m one who needed it.
@finitebanjo there is bunch of misconception about methanol. If I remember correctly it is created by partial fermentation of cellulose, so pits and seeds left in fermenter in making of fruit distillates. But the yeast just likes sugars more so it is just really small quantity and you just discard the “head” part (that is distilled first) and take only the part with mostly ethanol.
Lighter alcohol is basically made from sugar water, no cellulose is there so no methanol is created.
Also methanol poisoning is bit weird - methanol is harmless in the body but metabolites are dangerous. Basically ethanol is broken down to acetaldehyde that is useful for other metabolic processes, but methanol is broken down to formaldehyde that is dangerous and for some reason likes to damage optical nerves.
Fortunately enzyme that breaks down ethanol don’t like methanol that much, so when you drink some small amount of methanol mixed with ethanol you pee out the methanol and process the ethanol. Antidote for methanol is literally keeping you drunk until you pee out all the methanol.
I hope this info will at least clear out some of the misconceptions that you got.
this is actually inaccurate, it’s nearly impossible to separate methanol out by normal distillation, this is how ethanol is ‘denatured’ so it can be sold without the liquor tax. If people could just easily redistill that to remove the methanol, they would be doing it like crazy and the government would have figured out some other way of denaturing.
Methanol is (generally) not an issue because unless you’re fermenting really wrongly, you’re just not producing very much of it at all.
TIL that somewhere the intentional mix of methanol into ethanol is sold as denatured alcohol.
I think it is quite idiotic to denature alcohol by making it toxic with nearly the same taste. Here it has loose limits on methanol but it’s still mostly ethanol with bunch of bad tasting compounds, otherwise the toxicity is same as normal alcohol.
Also it is true that you can’t get rid of the methanol completely, but the boiling points are ~15°C apart so it is easy to get to the safe limits. That’s another reason why methanol isn’t the best denaturing agent - the compound used here has boiling point ~1°C above the ethanol.
During prohibition in 30’s was that they were filling the bottles directly from still so first few bottles were nearly all methanol. And also government denatured only with methanol (that tastes the same) so it was more of intentional poisoning of people.
the boiling points are different, but if you’ve ever run a still you understand that it’s a spectrum of compounds that come through the still, it’s not like the still just runs at 65C and only spits out methanol until all the methanol is gone and then moves on (even with fractioning, but that certainly can help).
Your best defense is to ferment your wash properly so you’re not producing a ton of methanol to begin with.
Today, I learned. It puts a whole new perspective on those ballads about “White Lightning”, which is the extent of my experience with distilling. Did you seed or pit your fruits? The recipes I’m currently reading seem to put a lot of emphasis on using apricot or cherry pits as ingredients that are added after the pulp. They only had seeded grapes back in 1829, so that must have been a factor in flavoring it? I’m a little hesitant to lean too hard into “authenticity”.
I know about people that do this. The final product tends to be bit smoother and according to them the fermentation is bit faster. Some distillers get rid of them right before it goes to the still but it really depends on the fruit.
I did only cherry distillation and it is not possible to pit all of them so I didn’t bother. Also I don’t drink that much of it so 4l lasted me 5years and I still have it, I just don’t do it that often.
Good to know that pitting is not that important to the wine. Once a year I think of investing in a cherry pitter tool, but fresh cherries are very expensive where I live. At most, I’m gonna buy 1 small bag and eat them immediately. The canned cherries for sale have had all the flavor zapped out of them. Was your 4l of wine good to drink?
It would be so easy for you to take some simple precautionary steps and you would rather type up this long ass comment to convince yourself and nobody else that you are the exception to the rules.
Sorry dude, but you’re just wrong on this. Methanol is only ever an issue in distilled spirits and that is not what OP is even doing here.