You really have to wonder about people willing to risk drinking stuff like that (methanol, not your ESB). Even I’m not that stupid. I can understand a hopelessly alcholic homeless person drinking mouthwash or cleaning products, or whatever. But people in a country where there isn’t booze to begin with can’t get that bad off. Or maybe they can.

Nothing like dying for a buzz. Very sad.

Don’t worry about the call. True to form, I was not home for much of the day (not counting being at work in the home office). I had a church bidness meeting right after work, and didn’t get home until medium-late.

And you got me thinking that the idea of throwing together (I was going to say “ginning up”) whatever cheap, possibly toxic crap you can in order to achieve intoxication is about as contrary to the ethos of homebrewing as you can get. A moonshiner (aside from being a lawbreaker, either here or in the Islamic Republic) could possibly make his product with high aesthetic standards, but moonshining seems more likely to be oriented to producing Bottled Drunkeness than it is to honing a craft.

Down with distillation! Up with fermentation!

Perhaps distilling has more specific safety requirements than canning, but it isn’t as complex as making the simplist pharmaceuticals. The reason that people can’t distill in this country is because if the tax revenue. Remember the first showdown with the ATF?

While it is true that low-volume distillers are hardly known for their product’s aesthetic sublty, there is nothing inherent in the craft which would keep someone from keeping a few 1 gallon oak barrels aging in a cellar. I have heard of homebrewers who crank up the gravity with corn sugar for a fermented beverage approaching liquor strengths.

I remember my dad in the 70’s, probably even into the 80’s, compounding ointments out of already compounded dry active ingredients and a base, in the back of the store on the same porcelain slab he ate his lunch on (of course carefully cleaning it between processes and meals). You certainly couldn’t do that today, regulations being what they are (even then he was cheating by putting his lunch in the same fridge with the insulin, but hey, he couldn’t afford two coolers!), but it’s not that complex a process in every case.