A U.S. appeals court on Friday declared unconstitutional a nearly 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling, calling it an unnecessary and improper means for Congress to exercise its power to tax.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in favor of the nonprofit Hobby Distillers Association and four of its 1,300 members.
They argued that people should be free to distill spirits at home, whether as a hobby or for personal consumption including, in one instance, to create an apple-pie-vodka recipe.
The ban was part of a law passed during Reconstruction in July 1868, in part to thwart liquor tax evasion, and subjected violators to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
K, now make any and all drugs legal
I feel this ruling is going to have explosive results.
For blindingly obvious reasons.
I’m seeing a lot of misinformation in this thread. Stills don’t “blow up”. That was a myth perpetuated by law enforcement in the same spirit that smoking pot will make you go crazy. Making soup in a pressure cooker is far more dangerous than using a still. Distilling liquor is done at atmospheric pressure, no part of the equipment is ever under pressure.
Didn’t you hear? Dick says that’s all a myth, a ruse by the government to get more taxes… to do evil things like build roads schools and hospitals! This video is propaganda!
I envy the Canadian lemmings whose tax money is being used to build roads, schools, and hospitals 😫
The setup in the video is not a still. It’s a device designed specifically to create an explosion. You could replace the ethanol with hairspray, WD-40, butane from a lighter, gasoline, nail polish remover, or any number of household items to achieve the same effect.
False. My great grandpa was a bootlegger. There are and we’re explosions and fires making hooch.
Home distilling is significantly different than bootlegging. The biggest batch that I start with is 5 gallons. Bootleggers were working with commercial quantities.
You don’t need initial pressure to have an explosion. Flammable vapors in a confined space, even at low pressure, can explode if ignited.
If it exceeds a particular vapor pressure, the ethanol fumes become too rich to explode, just like any other explosive vapor. The high vapor pressures of a still wouldn’t lend themselves well to exploding. Fires, sure. But unless you’re distilling over an open flame and something horribly wrong happens with your still, it’s not very likely to burst into flames. Most small scale hobbyist stills are electric nowadays
Yeah, making moonshine was a rural pastime in my country for ages, even when it was illegal, and the most danger from it that I’ve heard is that the result smells and tastes pretty damn nasty.
Wikipedia says:
Alcohol concentrations at higher strengths (the GHS identifies concentrations above 24% ABV as dangerous) are flammable and therefore dangerous to handle. This is especially true during the distilling process, when vaporized alcohol may accumulate in the air to dangerous concentrations if adequate ventilation is not provided.
This sounds like it requires the air to taste like a Martini.
Hold my beer, I’m about to hot-box the distilling room.
Yes, you can vape alcohol. No, you really shouldn’t, because if you get too drunk off it you can’t throw up or have your stomach pumped.
So long as they’re doing it for personal use and being safe enough to not blow up the neighborhood, I don’t care. If they wanna sell for others to consume then obviously that’s a whole other thing.
It’s the “being safe enough” part that’s the problem. How do you regulate that? Do you really believe that the average American is capable of operating something as dangerous as a still in a completely safe manner?
If we were talking about homebrewing, yeah, absolutely, that shit is awesome and there is no good argument against. Home distilling is basically building a bomb and hoping that it doesn’t go off before you get wrecked enough on moonshine to notice it happening.
My grandma did it for decades and didn’t blow anyone up. Nobody went blind either. You make it sound like it’s making a McNuke in your kitchen
Yeah man, its not that hard to do. I remain unexploded having cobbled together my “still”.
My great uncle Joe survived the entirety of WW2 despite being thrown into some of the worst fighting imaginable. This proves that war is completely safe for everyone involved.
How do you regulate that?
Create safety standards for small commercially manufactured stills. Most people are lazy, so those will significantly outnumber more sketchy DIY stuff. We have safety standards for other dangerous items like propane tanks, and they reduce the risk to a level most people find acceptable.
in a completely safe manner
There is no such thing. There’s a level of risk society finds acceptable. If a still can be as safe as a propane grill, I’m happy.
And if it could be as safe as a propane grill I would have no objections. But those things are orders of magnitude apart in terms of relative safety levels.
Do you have a source for that claim? I found this source suggesting otherwise; in New Zealand, where home distilling is legal and there wouldn’t be a reason to hide it, less than 0.14% of residential fires were caused by home distilling.
looks at instant pot
Y-you know…
I have a neighbor who parks his stupid Cybertruck in his garage every day. Google “Tesla explosion”. Another neighbor has a Toyota overland build truck, he has an exposed 5 gallon propane tank on the back and 20 gallons of fuel tanks on the sides, it just sits there waiting to detonate. Google “Home gas explosion”. Another neighbor puts his Giant Turkey fryer on his balcony and frys a huge turkey every thanksgiving. Google “Turkey fryer explosion”. The old guy across from me home builds black powder rifles as a hobby. He has at least a 50 pounds of black powder stored in his workshop. Google “Black powder explosion”. The kids get picked up in a school bus with 100 gallons of CNG on it. Google "CNG explosion ". The 7-11 at the end of the block has an open cage filled with propane tanks, many returns that may not have the current safety valves on them. Minimum wage employees are in charge of this and the local crackheads stand right by it, smoking cigarettes. Google “propane tank explosion”. Most of the houses in my neighborhood were built 40-50 years ago, they all have water heaters. Many have no Tpr valve, improper venting, ect. Google “water heater explosion”. I guess you might be right, we need way more laws and regulations to protect us from from the bombs all around us.
You know freedom means you can blow yourself up… not everyone lives in an apartment complex
First we had meth explosions, and now we can add still explosions. America has become one of the most dangerous countries, and the threat is coming from inside the house.
I just want to distill water for humidifier…
I’m pretty sure you can do this regardless, the ban was for distilling spirits. Water distillers are like $70 on Amazon
You could get a hot water humidifier. It does both at the same time.
Nothing is going to change, there won’t be any more stills blowing up in the future than there have in the past.
People who wanted to do this were already doing it. This just makes it legal. I doubt there were too many out there that wanted to, but we’re holding off because of the law, and now they can indulge.
Exactly. People are already out there distilling. This will help open up discussion and education about home distilling making it even safer. Is good.
5th Circuit
It’s nice to know how to feel about a ruling before you even read the actual opinion.
This is the rare occasion where they actually got a ruling right, for once.
Ugh, fine I’ll read it.
Uh oh, I guess I should too, then. I was just going by the headline, but I realize that it’s possible that the court came to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.
Truly entering our Hegseth era.
Y’all know the risk of home distillers blinding themselves via methanol poisoning is way higher than the risk of them blowing themselves up, right?
Only if you use fruits. Grain or sugar has very little methanol when fermented
Not really, it’s the exact opposite. There isn’t any more methanol in small scale shine than there is in homebrew beer. The risk is if you make a large enough batch that you can get a full bottle of just heads, and then decide to drink that for whatever reason. But even at moderate scales, that’s not going to happen.
Yeah, but an explosion word be incredibly rare, too. So rare that I think even the “get a full bottle of just heads and then decide to drink that for whatever reason” would still manage to be more likely.
That’s actually a myth, grain and sugar mash produce very little methanol, way below the harmful amount. Fruit mash can produce harmful amounts, but can be easily mitigated. Most cases of methanol poisoning are from people purposefully consuming it or from alcohol that has been adulterated with methanol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_incidents
You know the treatment for methanol poisoning is ethanol? As long as you’re tossing the fore shots and not putting them into a sour mash you’re fine.
This is the biggest win for homebrewers since Jimmy Carter.
Everyone in this thread talking about how people are gonna blow themselves up, but … okay? It’s up to the individual to make sure that they’re being safe and following adequate procedures. It’s not like working on cars, RC/drones (lithium batteries), flying planes, and guns are all perfectly safe hobbies, and those are all very normalized.
In terms of safety surrounding unwanted product, like methanol, it’s again the person’s responsibility. Much like how it’s up to the canner to make sure they’re not giving people botulism or a kombucha to have only the wanted bacteria.
As I understand it the risk of methanol poisoning from home distillation is hugely overstated in grain and sugar based mash and can be effectively mitigated in fruit based mash with fairly simply.
The problem wasn’t the individual blowing themselves up, it’s the individual starting a massive fire that spreads to surrounding structures. That’s less of a problem with modern fire suppression and building materials, though, so what made sense 158 years ago probably isn’t as big of a concern.
I’m talking about people in this thread commenting like this reversal is going to cause massive fires tomorrow.
But to your point, the ban was never about safety, it was about tax collection.
It could definitely cause a massive fire someday. Some home brewer blows up in California during a drought and suddenly you’ve got another wildfire in an urban area.
… but it probably was about taxes. The US doesn’t give a shit about public safety.
I don’t see people complaining about houses in the US using flammable and dangerous natural gas for tons of things, including drying clothes for chrissake. You know, a process that occurs by itself if you just leave the clothes in the air for a bit.
Didn’t I already say it? The US doesn’t give a shit about public safety.
I’d be in favor of banning gas stoves and clothes dryers, but that would probably cause a civil war.
I doubt even the risk of fire will a problem since modern home distillers will use small electric stills. And the alcohol boils of at about 170F, (about 76C for our challenged brethren in Texas). So the explosion risk is also very minimal.
The challenge is to maintain a steady temperature while distilling your booze. Just enough heat to drive off the alcohol while leaving the majority of water behind.
since modern home distillers will use small electric stills.
Acting like most of the people doing this aren’t the biggest rednecks on the planet… Meth labs don’t need to be dangerous either, and yet… (not comparing alcohol to meth before the angry replies come).
When you can go on amazon and buy an 8 gallon electric still you plug in to the wall for under $200, there ain’t much sense in redneck engineering a still.
It’s kind of like brewing beer, you could floor malt your barley, but ain’t nobody doing that at home.
What about BBQs? You’ve got people, often drinking, handling things like propane canisters and burning charcoal while cooking objects that emit flammable oils in dry grass or right next to their home. It’s a recipe for disaster.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the problem is that there’d be a civil war if you tried to stop people from burning shit. There’s a compromise being made between public safety and the public’s appetite for regulatory restrictions.
But also, like I said, fire is less of a problem with modern fire suppression and building materials. I wonder if those propane grills would actually be legal if our cities were still built like they were 158 years ago. I also wonder if they’ll remain legal forever, or if increasing droughts and infrastructure decay will force bans in some cities.
That and home made hooch can sometimes make people go blind if they do it wrong and there’s too much (I wanna say?) methanol in the batch.
That occurred because the US government poisoned the supply of alcohol during prohibition.
Thats actually a myth, it’s basically nothing in sugar and grain based mashes and can be mitigated easily with fruit mashes. It’s one of those things that’s been perpetuated through scaremongering, almost all cases have been purposeful methanol consumption or adulteration - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_incidents
The very first incident I clicked on makes it look like it’s definitely an issue. Under Mexico on the site you linked-
Government restrictions on liquor and beer sales during the COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated the problem of illegal production and sale of alcoholic beverages in Mexico. Reportedly, 35 people died in 2020 in just one mass poisoning incident due to methanol tainted drinks
Still waiting for Big Brother to get off my ass about my uranium enrichment hobby.
So tired of government overreach smh
smh my heads
I have the same issue with my virus lab. They’re just exotic pets, man.
Yeah, gotta take courses for some of those right? Get a licence? Some have safety standards so you know what you get and come with instructions on how to operate them?
There are rules and regulations on almost everything you listed. Because health and safety regulations are written in blood.
Or, you know, be indifferent to human suffering and societal cost and basic common sense. Very American vibe these days.
Actually no: there are no courses, licensing, rules, or regulations for a hobbyist (which is who this ruling affects) on the majority of the things that I listed (cars, RC/drones, canning, making kombucha, and even to a certain extent guns. We trust adults to be adults and learn the skills required to do these things because the risk is almost entirely to them.
If we had to ban everything that had a chance of causing harm to people, shouldn’t we ban gas stoves? Those could cause an explosion if someone was careless and left the gas running.
A dude distilling 5 gallons of wash in his backyard for his own personal consumption is not the same as a distillery processing 1000 gallons of wash.
Ironically gas stoves produce as much of the carcinogen benzene as having a smoker in your kitchen. This likely has contributed to the rise in non smoker lung cancer, which is more prevalent in women (who are more likely to be using said stove).
We need to ban gas stoves, but not for the reasons you state.
Actually yes: Consumer protection regulations exist for cars, RC/drones and parts, canning supplies, and certainly guns. All those components are set up so that they function a certain way, more dangerous versions are restricted, and governments try at the very least to educate people about the dangers of just DIY stuff (e.g. safe home canning). Your illusion of competent adults is created, in part, by a framework of regulatory guardrails.
Where did I say ban everything that’s dangerous? Do you want to have no restrictions on anything? Lots of things that are dangerous are banned or restricted, and you’re probably alive and healthy today in part for that.
Dude distilling 5 gallons of wash with no understanding of how it works, the danger to him or his neighbours, no regulation of the parts or ingredients that go into his setup is a menace and an accident waiting to happen.
All those components are set up so that they function a certain way, more dangerous versions are restricted
TY for making my point for me, it was really nice of you. Legalization is what allows those manufactured safeguards to exist. Without legalization, there is no way a company is going to sell a still that meets a UL safety metric. Which in turn causes anyone who wants to do this to use a cobbled together rig that’s probably leaking fuel or gases.
Lots of things that are dangerous are banned or restricted
And lots of things that are dangerous are not banned or restricted, and are in fact extremely normalized. I could go buy fireworks in a tent on the side of the road, without needing to provide my age or any sort of training – and fireworks are VASTLY more dangerous than distilling.
Dude distilling 5 gallons of wash with no understanding of how it works, the danger to him or his neighbours, no regulation of the parts or ingredients that go into his setup is a menace and an accident waiting to happen.
Again, this is a product of prohibition and not having access to safe equipment or information. The cost/barriers to entry for home distilling are also very high. There is a minimum amount of research that you would need to do in order to understand what the procedure is and what equipment you would even need.
Finally, I will once again state that the dangers of home distilling are extremely overblown. When New Zealand legalized home distilling there were zero reports of methanol poisoning from home-distillation, caused 0.14% of residential fires, and 0 deaths. 1 2 3.
Someone is literally more likely to have a fire and/or die from an unattended candle.
The cost/barriers to entry for home distilling are also very high.
What? No. Equipment is so trivial it can be home made and still work.
Probably clearer if i wrote: “the cost OR barriers to entry are very high”
A cheap liquor still off the shelf is like $300, which is definitely not impulse buy territory IMO and before even getting to this point you’d have to have done at least a trivial amount of research to have learned how to distill and what machines to look at in the first place.
Alternatively, they could build their own. But that would require doing an extensive amount of research on how to build a still, which in turn would end up providing you with a bunch of safety information regardless.
This is definitely not common knowledge.
Actually no: there are no courses, licensing, rules, or regulations for a hobbyist […] If we had to ban everything that had a chance of causing harm to people, shouldn’t we ban gas stoves?
Why did you jump from “courses, licensing, rules or regulations” to “ban everything”? Those are two completely different arguments.
The companies who build gas stoves for public use should 100% be regulated.
You do not need anything to work on cars or fly rc aircraft (within limits) and can freely play with various lithium batteries in many different manners.
You are talking about it being common sense to protect people from themselves, yet you could just as easily say it should be common sense to beleive everyone will take precautions before playing with gasoline. That’s the funny thing. There’s no such thing as common sense. “Common sense” is a bullshit concept for people to act like everyone knows something just because it’s part of the complainer’s life experience already. You know gasoline is dangerous but can be controlled. I know people generally know enough about gasoline by time they can interact with it to be safe. But if someone never interacted with it before, they’d have no idea how it behaves or what dangers are associated with it. Like, would you know how to store fertilizer in a way that it won’t combust? To farmers, it’s common sense. That doesn’t make it universally common knowledge. Or should it be obvious that snow is very slippery and might require you to drive at 1/4 speed? If you live in a place that gets snow, it’s common sense. Yet, every year, some place just south of the usual snow line gets snow for the first time in a decade and the streets become undrivable with cars piled up from residential-speed crashes. It’s not common sense if the cars have always, undoubtedly, stopped in a predictable manner, even in rain.
Regulations notoriously lack hobbyists’ level of common sense anyway. There’s often a gap between what’s legal and whether inexperienced people would even think to check if some activity is legal. The only tip off is if certain supplies are regulated.
Please take your soap box over to the gun control communities, where real lives can be saved. Your concern about home brewing is misallocated, hyperbolic and patently false.
Actually no. There’s no restriction on you doing any of that on your own or at home. Just like anyone can cook whatever they want in their house even if they don’t know how to properly handle food, there’s nothing stopping anyone from hopping on Amazon and grabbing an RC kit or buying a pressure cooker, etc. Common sense and personal responsibility are kind of a big part of individuality and independence. For hobbyists generally they’re not endangering the public, just themselves. Which is your god given right lol.
Funnily there are laws around some obviously dangerous things (like making bombs) but not others (like owning a muzzle loading cannon or flame thrower) generally don’t (IANAL, check your local laws).
Ahh, you can just go buy a gun and use it in your own home with no license or background check eh? Rah rah America I guess.
As for the rest, there are layers upon layers of consumer protection regulations that go into limiting what parts you can buy, what can be imported, what quality it is, how it should work. I guess if you’re gonna be real intense you can go buy some lithium cells, motors, 3d print parts etc, but outside of that there is a vast framework of overlapping regulations trying to keep stupid people from hurting themselves or others. Your ignorance of the systems protecting you doesn’t mean they aren’t there or that they aren’t important, and they probably contribute to the illusion of competence and divine support so many have. It’s not Good keeping you safe, it’s actually the government.
Hello Canadian!
Yes, assuming you are buying a non nfa gun you’re allowed to have from a person instead of a ffl holder you can completely legally buy a gun with no license or background check.
There are many additional jurisdictions that place restrictions on that practice though.
You’re wildly overestimating the volume and enforcement of what can be called consumer protection regulations.
Take canning, for example: there’s no law against advertising some device that can’t reach 15lbs of pressure, the requirement set forth by the fda to prevent botulism, as appropriate for canning even for low acid foods like green beans that are the exact target for botulism.
There’s no law against selling a lithium battery powered device that relies on the controller built into its specific power brick and it’s specifically wired usbc terminated cable for overcharge or overheat safety and reliably catches fire when it’s plugged up to any other power brick/usbc cable combination.
Idk about Canadian canning laws, but I know for a fact that there are no protections about the other example in the great white north because the same design has been all over insurance claims for house fires there too.
To answer your gun “question” the answer is generally no, it’s DEFINITELY no where I live but gun laws vary. I own guns, they required licensing and background checks and waiting periods. My drone had to be registered with the FAA to fly legally and even then many places are completely off limits to me.
Americans tend to be obsessed with convenience and will sacrifice almost anything or anyone to increase their convenience in even the smallest way, including rejecting the concepts of public and personal health and safety.
Do you need a license to operate a gas stove or a propane grill?
Can anyone make a gas stove or propane grill? Can you rig up your own home-made propane tank? Can you get your propane from a rando who mixed it at home? Are there rules and restrictions on ventilation and how houses are built or where you can use your grill? Be reasonable.
Yes, yes, no but you can probably get bootleg propane (it’s happening in India right now), depends on jurisdiction.
Presumably like homebrewed beer and wine, you can’t sell it, correct?
That would make it commercial use and not just personal.
For those pearl-clutching about fire and explosion safety, you don’t need anything more than a bucket and a really cold few days to distill alcohol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_freezing
Things like ice beer and applejack are made this way and were presumably banned as well
Now you can resume pearl-clutching about methanol and fusel alcohols
Here’s a video on how to make moonshine.
Popcorn Sutton: This is the last dam run of likker… https://youtu.be/glQjCKAI4gA
My GGF was a metal worker. He would make the stills, disassemble them and sell them with clear instructions how to reassemble.
Wait, in the land of the free home distilling is illegal?
Yup. But nobody follows the law.
Not really, we have “laws” and as long as you weren’t making money no one cared , we have TV shows of people in a competition with home distilleries, this is basically just fixing a outdated bullshit law from 158 years ago
