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.
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.