The parents of Holly Bowles and Bianca Jones remain at their bedsides in separate Thai hospitals as the Melbourne women fight for their lives after drinking tainted alcohol.
A few years ago a brewery in Brazil sold beers contaminated with methanol, it was a problem that occurred in the production process. Several people died and others were left with serious sequelae for the rest of their lives.
I want everyone to understand that you can not have methanol type poisoning from the regular beer brewing process. Too many people think home brewing is harder or can lead to poisoning… it just doesn’t happen.
This is only possible in commercial brewing where the tanks have temperature jackets.
And even in commercial brewing you’re required to use safe substances in the jackets, in case there is some type of hole. In the US I think the only thing approved is propylene glycol which is non-toxic (but expensive in large quantities).
How this even happened is beyond me… but that’s why they require food safe, just in case.
You can’t get methanol poisoning from normal beer brewing process but you could from someone spiking their beer to up the abv, though that still seems unlikely.
Also when distilling it is more a matter of scale. Heads have a high level of methanol so if your batch is big enough and you don’t discard the heads then you can get a whole bottle or more of methanol which is more than enough to make you sick. Probably not going to happen with a 5 or 10 gallon mash but some moonshiners do large enough batches where it is technically possible, through massive incompetence, to poison people.
Another fun fact you reminded me of when talking about getting something up the their ABV is that in the US you’re allowed a very significant margin of error, basically 0.3%. This is because it can be hard to control fermentation temperature and batches can vary… But that’s not the case for the big brewers, they can afford tanks with precision that would have been thought impossible before. So basically any light beer you see, you can shave like 0.3% off that. If it says 4.5, it’s likely 4.2, bud heavy is probably more like 4.7 now.
A few years ago a brewery in Brazil sold beers contaminated with methanol, it was a problem that occurred in the production process. Several people died and others were left with serious sequelae for the rest of their lives.
https://news.yahoo.com/brazil-reports-third-death-suspected-214825227.html
I want everyone to understand that you can not have methanol type poisoning from the regular beer brewing process. Too many people think home brewing is harder or can lead to poisoning… it just doesn’t happen.
This is only possible in commercial brewing where the tanks have temperature jackets.
And even in commercial brewing you’re required to use safe substances in the jackets, in case there is some type of hole. In the US I think the only thing approved is propylene glycol which is non-toxic (but expensive in large quantities).
How this even happened is beyond me… but that’s why they require food safe, just in case.
You can’t get methanol poisoning from normal beer brewing process but you could from someone spiking their beer to up the abv, though that still seems unlikely.
Also when distilling it is more a matter of scale. Heads have a high level of methanol so if your batch is big enough and you don’t discard the heads then you can get a whole bottle or more of methanol which is more than enough to make you sick. Probably not going to happen with a 5 or 10 gallon mash but some moonshiners do large enough batches where it is technically possible, through massive incompetence, to poison people.
Another fun fact you reminded me of when talking about getting something up the their ABV is that in the US you’re allowed a very significant margin of error, basically 0.3%. This is because it can be hard to control fermentation temperature and batches can vary… But that’s not the case for the big brewers, they can afford tanks with precision that would have been thought impossible before. So basically any light beer you see, you can shave like 0.3% off that. If it says 4.5, it’s likely 4.2, bud heavy is probably more like 4.7 now.