U.S. Supreme Court to review 1868 federal ban on home distilling of liquor(staradvertiser.com) |
U.S. Supreme Court to review 1868 federal ban on home distilling of liquor(staradvertiser.com) |
I'm convinced. And it's making me think anyone that disagrees hates apple pie and America.
use yeast to convert sugars from apples into alcohol: fermentation
boil that until it becomes a concentrated liquor: distillation
distillation is significantly more dangerous than fermenting
In the U.S., heroin, LSD, and marijuana are the same federal schedule. Have to fill the for-profit prison labor camps somehow, and admitting dealing marijuana isn’t as dangerous as dealing heroin would put a dent in that. Leave that to the corporate opioid peddlers legally addicting Americans in pain.
https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-fda-failure...
Washington as an unquestioned justification for anything should never be the argument.
Now I think it's dumb to prohibit home distillers and it actually inhibits industry evolution. There is a lot of experimentation that happens in grey areas of the law with homemade spirits and it would be interesting to see how things adapt if the law was lifted.
All that said home distillation is dangerous. Ethanol at volumes sufficient for bottling is explosive, methanol poisoning is real, and even if the techniques for safely distilling it from a mash are learned in a high school chemistry class most people aren't great at it.
I'm a big whiskey enjoyer and home cook and have done a few "dangerous" things myself w/ food and beverages. If the law goes away I know I'm going to do some stuff in the basement and accept the risk myself. But I'm a little wary of laws being lifted that definitely protect people, even if it's a side effect of taxation.
Even just a half decent kitchen knife will be razor sharp and capable of removing a digit or two if handled incorrectly.
No, it is not. Not more dangerous than rice stir‑frying
> methanol poisoning is real
Ethanol is antidot. So again, your chances to severely poison yourself not much higher than if you instead of alcohol were doing Japanese cuisine.
Some people just enjoying have hobbies; distilling hooch isn't on my bingo card, but it being illegal in the era of "we swear it's definitely not sports betting" is silly.
Liquor has become consolidated among a half dozen global conglomerates. Varieties have been streamlined. Folks who are into making historical cocktails tend to hit roadblocks or make modern "almost" substitutions.
I'm in favor of this ban being struck down, even though I can't really take advantage of it. I brewed beer and wine when I was younger, but for health reasons, I can't drink alcohol anymore.
If such tests exist, it would seem like they could go a long way to increasing the safety of home distilling. If no such test is possible, maybe it makes sense to regulate very tightly?
Also: it’s a bit crazy to overturn Wickard simply because so much subsequent development rests on it, but it was wrongly decided. The commerce power shouldn’t ever have been read as broadly as it was.
The government is only allowed to do what is “necessary and proper” to make enforcement effective. There are reasonable arguments on both sides as to whether prohibiting home distillation is as necessary as it was in the late 19th century.
> When federal appellate courts reach opposing conclusions, known as a circuit split, the odds exponentially increase for the Supreme Court to grant review and clear up the confusion. Likewise, when a federal statute is struck down in whole or in part, the Supreme Court is even more likely to hear the case. In these two cases, we have a perfect storm where both of those scenarios have occurred.
> If the taxing power supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause were the only issue in contention, we would already have quite a sexy Supreme Court case. To dress it up even further, plaintiff John Ream astutely argued in his Sixth Circuit filings that the federal ban on at-home alcohol distillation for personal consumption also exceeds Congress’s Article I power to regulate interstate commerce because the activity in dispute is neither commerce nor interstate.
> The Supreme Court’s misguided 1942 decision in Wickard v. Filburn found that Congress could regulate wheat even if it is consumed on its originating farm. In the time since, far too much mischief has been committed in the name of regulating interstate commerce that is neither interstate nor even commerce.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/5857091-home-distillin...
I thought it was already settled that making your own does affect interstate commerce because you are not buying from the market. That was covered in a Radiolab episode where this whole thing was decided.
Wickard v. Filburn: The Court decided that if Filburn used his own wheat for feed instead of buying it on the open market, it cumulatively affected interstate commerce and national market prices
I'm not saying I agree with that ruling. Only that it was already ruled on.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/21/health/alcohol-use-decline-st...
Whatever happened to a nice cold beer at the end of a hot day outside or a nice glass of wine with dinner? Home distillation and fermentation are also hobbies unto themselves in the same spirit (pun intended) of old-fashioned enjoyment, no mega-conglomerate marketing required.
A government should have no power over people’s private lives, so long as their actions do not infringe, and do not conspire to infringe, on the rights of others.
Big Honey and Big Apple are making off like bandits, however.
You could ban Apple pie and extract more tax from the slaves.
Many microbreweries and small breweries started when home brewers went pro. They had recipes that were popular. They decided to go through the fundraising and investment in order to build appropriate facilities and get licensed.
It's this permission to experiment and play that has inspired many of the popular ales available today.
It is rather tricky to distill liquor and NOT poison whoever drinks it. Especially on home or poorly maintained equipment.
That doesn't mean that one shouldn't be allowed to do these things. It means that we should provide appropriate training and, in some jurisdictions, reasonable / non-discriminatory licensing for those who wish to do these things.
When it comes to distillation, the rules are pretty straight-forward:
Keep a log book. Use quality equipment. Measure temperatures. Learn to discard heads and tails. Use appropriate ventilation and fire safety protocols. Purchase qualitative test equipment to verify that the product does not contain harmful contaminants. Licensing is a great way to ensure that people know about these things and follow them. A blanket ban actually makes it more likely that people who violate this ban to distill alcohol will poison themselves or others.
https://news.sky.com/story/three-men-charged-over-explosion-...
ethanol is incredibly explosive
Edit: In addition to a successful plan murder during the explosion.
I think it's perfectly acceptable if these is a reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing process, like for HAM radio or small game hunting, that covers safety. This doesn't eliminate the possibility of accidents, but it does reduce this possibility.
Methanol is a natural fermentation byproduct of pectin breakdown of fruits like plums, cherries, apricots as well as grapes.
Methanol collects in a still easier than ethanol. Methanol boils at approximately 64.7°C (148.5°F), while ethanol boils at 78.4°C (173.1°F). Professional distillers carefully measure and discard the initial fraction (the heads/foreshots) of a distillation run to remove the methanol. Easy for a novice to miss this key safety step.
My friend is a chemist and we both like whiskey so we thought experimented this.
You can speed up the aging of whiskey by increasing the surface area of charred wood. It takes 3 years in a barrel, a couple days (hours? maybe? I'm an engineer not a scientist) if you splinter it into wood chips and char them first and agitate the solution.
What you can't really speed up is the oxidation of the tannins which for all we know (barring experimentation) are a key part of the flavor profile. What you could do is mix in oxidizers like bubbling oxygen through it.
The combination of oxygen and ethanol has a name though: "liquid rocket fuel." The idea of combining heat, ethanol, oxygen, and agitating at bottling volumes sounded kinda scary.
I hope people don't try it at home without knowing what they're doing.
More realistically though, the biggest danger comes from leaky apparatus and an open flame. The horror stories come from home distillation over gas burners. Electric heat is plentiful and home stills would most likely be basically kettles.
Its going to be so disruptive but necessary to kill the administrative state
What does that look like? Honestly I think the collection of states will figure out their own coalitions, and Congress will find a way to still do federal agencies under different authority
I don’t like that the term federal has diverged from its definition to mean this separate layer of government in the same shape of the United States but controls all, this will put it back in line to the term of collaboration between its constituent states and the national entity
https://www.amazon.com/VEVOR-Alcohol-Distiller-Stainless-Ste...
Theres a good summary of the various laws at this site as well:
https://legallyexplained.com/is-it-illegal-to-own-a-still/
The bottom line appears to be:
[federal] You can own a still. You can distill water with it. You can't distill alcohol with it unless you register it and get a permit, which carries all sorts of other location restrictions, fees, paperwork requirements, etc.
[state] depends.
At least for the US.
As to the gasoline, please do note that incompetent distilling was being compared to incompetent storage there. So then the gasoline hasn't been properly capped off and has been left in (for example) a garden shed with insufficient airflow. That's once again likely to be more dangerous.
Do also consider that people in the US regularly deep fry using a gas burner. It seems self evident to me that heating a vat of oil to near the smoke point and then making it sizzle, all the while over an open flame, has to be vastly more dangerous on average than what you described.
Also you don't necessarily need to use an open flame to distill. An electric range works perfectly well.
It's a lot easier to deal with a small grease fire than vaporized ethanol around an open flame.
> Ethanol is antidot. So again, your chances to severely poison yourself not much higher than if you instead of alcohol were doing Japanese cuisine.
Uh huh that's why all people blinded by bad moonshine are living healthy with full eyesight and no other negative affects, just like people that ate some bad fish
Grease fires in comparison were one of the leading causes of house fires in the US the last time I checked. The worst case is getting splattered by burning droplets of oil that instantly scald any exposed skin while continuing to burn for long enough to light your clothing on fire. Personally I try to avoid pan frying on a range (as opposed to a dedicated appliance) and if I do I'm careful to verify the location of my fire blanket before starting.
TIL: Apparently the nickname for distilled apple cider is applejack. Never realized the origin of the cereal's name.
i really don't want to die because the downstairs neighbor wants to make his own craft vodka
The way this is solved in our country is that you can legally make your own alcohol, but only at a state-approved distillery, where the personnel knows how to handle this.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/5178
Considering the danger of distilling and most people do not have that much land; you likely would need to get approval from govt agencies anyway to be legal.
But also I do appreciate how many numbskulls there are out there.
They’d occasionally go blind from methanol in the shine or slowly give themselves lead poisoning from the solder in the still, but no fires. So, they were at least safety-aware enough not to want to lose all their product and get the authorities on their case by burning down the area around their still.
Do you perhaps mean fermentation? Distillation is exceptionally easy and not particularly difficult to clean up after. It remains perfectly safe provided you have a cheap digital thermometer, understand the importance of good ventilation, and use off the shelf parts. (The latter only because a custom setup built by a particularly incompetent individual could inadvertently result in the creation of a dangerous pressure vessel.)