Why is Home Distilling Still Illegal?
And What’s Being Done About It
America’s Colonial Spirits
When the Colonists arrived in America they had trouble drinking beer because shipping it from England was time consuming and expensive. They tried brewing their own beer, but the lack of barley in the new colonies wouldn’t be able to sustain large scale production. What the colonists did have an abundance of though was corn. Experimentation in alcohol making with this new crop eventually led to the tasty product of bourbon whiskey and soon there were thousands of individuals, mostly frontiersmen farmers, who were distilling their own spirits.
Until the early twentieth century, many households produced their own spirits for consumption, similar to how they might also bake their own bread or raise their own chickens instead of going to purchase those goods at a market. A relatively small, but very organized, group of teetotalers changed this in 1920 however after they caught all of the unorganized brewers and distillers by surprise and convinced Congress to pass the Volstead act, starting the thirteen year stretch of prohibition of alcohol.
While most Americans were understanding of food shortages during the first World War they were not as accepting when their alcohol was taken away from them. Alcohol was still widely available during Prohibition with doctors writing prescriptions for medicinal whiskeys and speakeasies were commonplace in the major cities. Even high-ranking officials like the U.S. president were known to still drink their cocktails during this era, making illegal alcohol less taboo.
The problems around this time arose from the fact that demand for booze was unchanged but supply had dwindled since breweries and distilleries were forced closed. People tried stretching their hard to obtain spirits by diluting them with other alcohols. Denatured alcohol used for industrial purposes could, with skilled hands, be purified and made drinkable. People became ill when distributors did a poor job of purifying the denatured alcohol but still mixed them in with whiskeys. These higher concentrations of methanol from the denatured alcohols caused people to get sick and is where the idea of “moonshine blindness” came from.
Home Brewing Makes a Comeback
By 1933 American citizens, brewers, and distillers finally said enough is enough and became organized enough to overturn the 18th amendment. Beer brewing made a comeback pretty quickly since the time it takes to go from unmilled grain to finished bottled beer out the door is only a few weeks. Whiskey on the other hand travelled on a rough road for several years because most whiskey is typically aged from five to ten years. Eventually though brewing and distilling had become big business again in the mid-twentieth century.
It took another four decades until 1978 for home brewing to become legal. Individuals could brew up to 100 gallons of beer for personal consumption without having to obtain permits or pay taxes. This arguably helped the rise of the craft beer movement in the decades that followed, allow many proficient home brewers to scale up their recipes and start up commercial breweries.
An Argument for Home Distilling
Unlike home brewing, the homemade distilling of spirits has not been re-legalized. Today individuals at home can at most distill some water, essential oils, and camping fuel (with the proper government permits). Producing any kind of distilled spirit intended for consumption is illegal without commercial distilling permits that cost several thousand dollars annually.
The arguments against home distilling usually fall into the following categories: it’s dangerous to make, it’s deadly to drink, and the government’s wallet will be hurt since home distillers won’t be going out to buy taxed alcohol anymore. Unfortunately, the arguments for preventing home distilling legalization are completely disputable.
- It’s not dangerous to make
The biggest danger with distilling spirits is that at times the product is very flammable. When distillate leaves a still the vapors and liquid can be more than 90% pure ethanol. This product can burn extremely easy and is a potential fire hazard. The other danger is that if a still is improperly built, it can become pressurized and explode under the wrong conditions.
While the above statements are true, distilling isn’t necessarily any more dangerous than pumping gas at a service station or cooking on a stove top — the same principles apply. Sure, an explosion can occur if that volatile 180 proof distillate comes in contact with an open flame. But similar to pumping fuel for their car, people just shouldn’t be smoking cigarettes while distilling alcohol.
And although exploding stills are technically possible, they would not be common since most small scale still designs use a flour paste seals that act as pressure release valves in the case of a still building up too much pressure. Sure, someone can build a bomb and call it a still and claim that it can explode, but this doesn’t mean that the 99% of users who are using some common sense wouldn’t know how to safely deal with creating a safe flour paste seal. In fact, New Zealand legalized distilling in 1996 and the instances of still related explosions and fires are tracked. Compared with household fires started from cooking accidents, according to the statistics distilling is safer than frying up some bacon and eggs.
2. It’s not dangerous to drink
So let me preface this argument that homemade spirits are just as dangerous to drink as any store purchased alcohol. They can still make you intoxicated and it is a bad idea to operate machinery while under the influence. However, the claims that homemade spirits will make you go blind are unrealistic.
This common belief has a small slice of truth in it which it what makes it a good myth. Methanol, a type of alcohol, can in fact make you sick, and in the worst case cause blindness or even death. During prohibition when bootleggers were stretching real bottles of whiskey by mixing in denatured industrial alcohols, some people did get sick because these denatured alcohols contained lots of methanol, (specially added to the industrial alcohols so people wouldn’t drink them!). The only methanol poisoning that was occurring was from people drinking industrial alcohol that was never meant for consumption in the first place.
Methanol is a byproduct of alcohol distillation too. However, the amount of methanol produced during the distilling process is miniscule. During distillation methanol is produced at the very beginning of a run in what distillers call the foreshots and is always tossed out. Even in the worst case scenario of home distillers not knowing about needing to discard this first small amount of liquid the amount of methanol that is produced at a home distilling capacity wouldn’t be enough to be deadly. It takes about 140 milliliters of methanol to be fatal and this could only be produced by distilling 149 liters of liquid, something that would be far out of the capacity of home distillers. That means that even if home distillers somehow forgot to take out the nasty smelling and awful tasting foreshots they would become drunk and pass out long before they would be able to consume enough methanol to sustain any serious injury.
3. It would not take away from tax revenue
Probably the biggest fear of government legalizing distilling would be that they would experience loss in tax revenue. If distilling would be made legal, the argument goes that people would just distill their own spirits at home and would spend less or no money on taxed alcohol.
This claim is wrong for several reasons. First, as fun, simple, and educational distilling spirits at home might be, it by no means is easy to create a good tasting product. Creating something that truly rivals what you could buy at the store would take a long time to perfect.
Secondly, many spirits are aged for years and the average individual will not want to or not have the storage space to age large amounts of liquor for a decade (not to mention that sourcing wooden barrels is probably cost prohibitive to most).
Additionally, large distilleries benefit from economies of scale — even if the home distiller could create something that is comparable in taste to what can be bought in a store, distilleries will be able to make and sell that same product for much cheaper because they are producing such large quantities of it at a time.
Finally, people who want to go through the trouble and expense of distilling their own alcohol are simply spirit geeks — they want to try lots of types of whiskies, gins, rums, etc… and aren’t just creating spirits at home to become drunk. Home brewing legalization in the 1970s kicked off a movement where the more people that brewed beer themselves, the more interested in beer they became and the more craft breweries that were able to open up because of that. In the past few decades, craft beer has exploded in the marketplace. If home distilling would become legal, I am sure the market size and number of craft distilleries would grow in a similar way.
The Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act of 2015 is currently waiting for review by Congress. If it passes by the end of 2016, it will allow Americans to legally distill at home.
