This might be interesting.
Since I was a kid I couldn't understand why private citizens can't roll their own moonshine. Strikes me the same as growing your own weed.
I get the taxation/revenue aspect, but in 2026 America who's going to produce enough liquor to make a difference? Just put sane limits on home production like some states do with weed.
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-distilling-spirits-reconstruction-ban-51131151865ded86093a99ec56451465Open linkView original on lemmy.world
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You can say what "this" is in the post title
We're allowed to home still here in New Zealand, but not smoke weed - go figure
Its because distillation can cause massive catastrophic explosions, your totally allowed to make alcohol without a still tho, a license id imagine is easy to obtain, probably a fee and a test
Stills can be explode if not properly maintained and operated.
It's actually quite difficult to brew moonshine that's good enough to drink. All those old stories about going blind off of home brewed moonshine are from methanol poisoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity
this isn't true and I wish the silly urban myth would die already. Ethanol is preferentially metabolised (competitive inhibition) over methanol, the only way to have enough methanol in home distillation to cause poisoning is if methanol has been deliberately added.
Apologies for the reddit link, but here is a fairly good writeup of the whole thing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/cv4bu8/methanol_some_information/
That's why the Wikipedia article mentions:
And the linked list of methanol poisoning incidents consists solely of cases where the liquor has been adulterated with methanol and not a single one caused by faulty distillation.
I'm guessing it's justified with the health impacts of having a bunch of new brewers and their friends going blind from mythenol poisoning. Producing moonshine is easy, producing edible moonshine not as much. Could be off base, I mean it's not illegal for people to grow nightshade either, so either way it's not a good reason.