US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

4/12/2026 at 8:16:08 AM

As tourists to sketchy places in Asia discovered, methanol poisoning is a real risk, even from large scale distillation. It is the quality control that matters. Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.

However, this ruling is not about alcohol, it is about dissolving Federal authority exercised via the trade and commerce clause of the Constitution.

by angry_octet

4/12/2026 at 9:57:14 AM

There are many hobbies with which people can kill themselves if they don't understand what they are doing. I don't see how brewing is different. A grown-up person has rights and bears the consequences of negligence and that's totally normal, that's what freedom is.

As long as the product is not sold outside but for personal consumption, it must be legal to make without any certifications.

by dmantis

4/12/2026 at 10:14:00 AM

Agree completely, though sadly we are a very long way from this. In a lot of places it is literally illegal and prison-time just for growing certain naturally-occurring plants for purely personal use. I don't see how this ruling helps with that at all though

by freedomben

4/12/2026 at 10:15:11 AM

I forget the exact wording, but the seat belt law are a good example of it. Laws are passed to protect the populace from self harm so that society doesn't suffer from it. It probably doesn't apply here because home distillation is very niche. However, if a bunch of people show up in emergency rooms and it drives up health care costs then expect a quick reversal in policy.

by SapporoChris

4/12/2026 at 10:29:17 AM

Right, and I, as someone living in France and paying a hefty part of my income to fund public healthcare, understand that the state would want to limit people doing stupid shit costing the society a fortune in fixing them (though, of course, this just creates a debate on where to draw the line).

But isn't the point of non-socialized healthcare, like in the US, that you pay for care out of pocket? Or maybe via your insurance, which will probably increase your premium if you repeatedly engage in stupid actions that need expensive fixing?

by vladvasiliu

4/12/2026 at 10:34:17 AM

> Or maybe via your insurance, which will probably increase your premium if you repeatedly engage in stupid actions that need expensive fixing?

US insurers can only discriminate by age and smoking status.

by vkou

4/12/2026 at 9:31:45 AM

From ~1906 through prohibition the Feds purposely poisoned industrial alcohol with methanol and other chemicals as a deterrent. 100 years ago, in 1926, they increased it, up to as much as 10%. This was true rotgut. Around 10,000 people, mostly poor, died from it. Blindness, organ failure, paralysis. This was legal and regulated by the Volstead Act. It was the primary source of methanol poisoning during prohibition.

by delichon

4/12/2026 at 10:23:20 AM

Do you have a source?

by giantg2

4/12/2026 at 10:15:52 AM

Yep, never forget. The government literally poisoned people. Anytime I mention this I get eye rolls and immediate dismissal as a kook. It's quite frustrating.

by freedomben

4/12/2026 at 10:24:16 AM

This is still routinely done to avoid ethanol taxes. It's called "denatured alcohol". Ethanol that has been poisoned is not considered drinkable alcohol, so not subject to the taxes on drinkable alcohol.

by direwolf20

4/12/2026 at 9:22:53 AM

The antidote to methanol is just ethanol.

If you find yourself drinking something untrustworthy you can at least cure yourself with a chaser of an equivalent amount of everclear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_toxicity#Treatment

by donatj

4/12/2026 at 10:17:49 AM

The way you're saying it is deeply irresponsible. The way to deal with methanol poisoning is not "just ethanol", and you cannot "cure yourself" by drinking everclear.

If you ever find out you have been drinking methanol by all means do drink safe spirits if you have immediate access to them (after throwing up what you can if you're still in time), but get medical help now. Ethanol will not cure you from methanol poisoning, it will only help reduce and delay the damage somewhat while you're waiting for an ambulance or making your way to a hospital to get proper treatment.

by Mordisquitos

4/12/2026 at 10:19:02 AM

While the treatment for methanol poisoning indeed includes ethanol, I don’t think your dosage suggestion is right. Your body would still have to process all the methanol, the job of the ethanol is just to slow down the reaction. If you suspect methanol poisoning you need the hospital, they will administer the ethanol intravenously and I think do dialysis to remove the methanol and the formic acid it metabolizes to (this is one of the toxins in ant venom)

https://doi.org/10.1053/j.ajkd.2016.02.058

by rsfern

4/12/2026 at 10:03:27 AM

you are saving lives, friend.

by dr_dshiv

4/12/2026 at 9:22:19 AM

The common knowledge about methanol being a huge risk is wildly overstated in reality, and likely continues in part because it benefits the government for people to believe strongly in the danger and continue to purchase taxed liquor. Distillation does not create new chemicals: there is methanol in your bottle of wine, and distilling that wine into brandy does not change the ratio, it only removes (primarily) water. Common distilling practice is to dispose of the highest concentrations of the most volatile components (acetaldehyde, higher alcohols). Low levels of methanol remain present in a gradient throughout the distilled product. Methanol production in fermentation is not a significant risk if you're not fermenting woody materials, and its production can be mitigated through the use of pectic enzyme. Methanol IS a risk if you're starting with cheap, untaxed denatured alcohol (ethanol+methanol+bitterants+other crap) as your input, rather than the unadulterated output of a sugar fermentation, and that is mainly what gave rise to the popular methanol folklore.

That said, don't break the law, folks. It's not worth going to prison for tax evasion over a jug of shine. You can get just as tipsy off a couple glasses of fermented supermarket apple juice, and it's legal and cheaper to boot.

by theodric

4/12/2026 at 10:33:39 AM

pretext to context.

by cyanydeez

4/12/2026 at 8:25:31 AM

> Illegal stills make quality control impossible, so legalisation and government certified testing can make it safe.

Another way to increase safety is to reduce the availability of illegal stills without quality control by enforcing the ban.

(Anyone who thinks otherwise presumably also thinks all hard drugs should be legalized since this presumably wouldn't lead to an increase in consumption.)

by cubefox

4/12/2026 at 10:17:15 AM

> (Anyone who thinks otherwise presumably also thinks all hard drugs should be legalized since this presumably wouldn't lead to an increase in consumption.)

Why should the government be in the business of reducing consumption? Do you believe alcohol to be immoral, and the government's role to be enforcing morality?

by freedomben

4/12/2026 at 10:25:39 AM

I think hard drugs being legal would greatly increase the amount of responsible consumption. Methamphetamine used to be purchaseable from any pharmacy over the counter in the US, and there was not a meth crisis at that time. Now there is.

by direwolf20

4/12/2026 at 5:28:29 AM

The article is devoid of any meaningful legal language. It is important to note that this ruling applies only to the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi as the fifth circuit is the court that decided this. That said, when parties bring cases to other federal circuit courts, they may cite this case. Frequently, circuit decisions can impact other district courts decisions.

by ghastmaster

4/12/2026 at 5:39:23 AM

The court invalidated IRC Sections 5601(a)(6) and 5178(a)(1)(B), finding they go beyond Congress’s taxation powers. The court’s reasoning was that these provisions amount to an “anti revenue provision” that prevents distilled spirits from coming into existence, since under 26 U.S.C. § 5001(b) taxation begins as soon as the spirit exists, so banning production eliminates the taxable event entirely.

Here are the official docs for the case

McNutt v. US Department of Justice

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca5.220...

by Jimmc414

4/12/2026 at 6:00:36 AM

I like the analysis of "necessary" and "proper" sections of this opinion. Hopefully, this ruling gets expanded to other circuits and eventually leads to the US Supreme Court ignoring stare decisis with regard to wickard v filburn and let it be thrown in the dust bin of history.

by ghastmaster

4/12/2026 at 6:52:14 AM

Sounds similar to the 'tax' power making it impossible to buy a tax stamp for a post 86 machine gun.

by mothballed

4/12/2026 at 8:09:46 AM

The Fifth Circuit tells us how the Supremes will vote.

by angry_octet

4/12/2026 at 7:25:46 AM

Edit: According to AI, I've got this a bit backwards. The ruling hits the taxing power, not the commerce clause. It's nonetheless interesting, since the machine gun ban may be affected.

The court says that you can't use a tax to ban something outright, which is what the post-1986 machine gun ban is: refusing to collect a tax on post-1986 machine guns, effectively banning them.

That leaves the commerce clause as the remaining defense for all taxes-as-bans or general outright bans. And that suggests future cases where Wickard will be under scrutiny.

---

I am not a lawyer, but I think this ruling is far more interesting than it appears.

It is aiming a crosshair at Wickard v. Filburn, which ruled that a farmer that produced wheat on his farm to exclusively to feed livestock on that same farm was affecting interstate commerce, and could be penalized for overproduction to support price controls. Keep in mind, that this definition of "interstate commerce" is so broad that it essentially reduces the category of "intra-state commerce" to nothing, which seems dubious.

That ruling is the basis of a huge portion of the federal government's powers under the commerce clause of the constitution.

The supreme court will likely have to rule on this eventually, and how it threads the needle will be very important.

If Wickard were simply struck down, the U.S. would be reformed into a weak federation, akin perhaps to pre-EU Europe, where laws vary wildly between states, and the federal government has little power. No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.

That's unlikely to happen, but the court would either have to reaffirm Wickard, or would have to come up with a new standard to keep, say, the $200 tax on pre-1986 machine guns effective (preventing a garage machine gun), but allow some notion of non-economic activity like home distilling to continue.

The OBBB reduced the tax on suppressors to $0, which strongly undermines the idea that home production of suppressors can be regulated by Wickard, since there is no tax interest to protect.

How it might affect the controlled substances act is more complicated, since there is no tax on illegal drugs, and the government has decided to entirely ban non-pharmaceutical street drugs, hence even "hobby" production clearly undermines that policy.

It's an area with lots of apparent but longstanding contradictions and questionable standards, but it would upend much of the New Deal to reverse it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

by avidiax

4/12/2026 at 7:44:58 AM

> No EPA, no federal minimum wage, no forced integration, reduced civil rights, only direct interstate commerce being regulated.

States can still do civil rights etc.

by eru

4/12/2026 at 7:57:00 AM

A quick look at our history shows why this was important at a federal level.

by adzm

4/12/2026 at 7:58:55 AM

Another quick look at your history also tells you why a strong federal government has downsides. Life is full of compromises, but I like me some subsidiarity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

by eru

4/12/2026 at 8:05:18 AM

Seems to have worked rather well though.

by jjtwixman

4/12/2026 at 8:25:32 AM

If it works so well, perhaps delegate authority even more centrally. To the UN or so?

by eru

4/12/2026 at 9:58:45 AM

I mean you said it yourself, it's a compromise. Giving the states free reign to terrorise their populations didn't work out so great. The relatively strong federal government of more recent times however seems to have worked out not so badly. Now there's a retarded paedohpile in office starting random wars and of course all bets are off. The US political system actually probably is quite shit, but I don't think it's about centralisation vs decentralisation, but electing an unaccountable king every 4 years is just a retarded and easily exploitable system.

by jjtwixman

4/12/2026 at 10:29:53 AM

> Giving the states free reign to terrorise their populations didn't work out so great.

Be careful not to be anachronistic. When the US was a young country, before telegraphs and railways were widespread, most people's primary interface with the government was perhaps their municipality or at the highest level perhaps their county.

> The relatively strong federal government of more recent times however seems to have worked out not so badly.

I am not so sure. Different people in different parts of the country have different preferences. Much easier to satisfy them, if you don't centralise too much.

> [...] but electing an unaccountable king every 4 years is just a retarded and easily exploitable system.

Much better to elect 3,143 kings, one for every county. If you don't like the one your neighbours (and you) voted for, just move to the next town over.

by eru

4/12/2026 at 5:22:42 AM

In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.

Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.

by fzeindl

4/12/2026 at 6:21:10 AM

Alcohol is always poisonous (but mixed with methanol quite a bit more poisonous ) :-)

by frankzander

4/12/2026 at 7:38:58 AM

And if you have one of those poisons the antedote is the other one.

Edit: only one way round! This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I am not your doctor or drinking doula.

by dnnddidiej

4/12/2026 at 7:49:46 AM

you suggest additional drinking methanol when you're "normally" drunk?? that's dangerously counterfactual.

by froh

4/12/2026 at 7:58:50 AM

No, ethanol is an antidote to methanol

by adzm

4/12/2026 at 7:58:42 AM

vice versa

> Ethanol is the most commonly used antidote to block the metabolising of methanol. Ethanol works by competing with the metabolic breakdown of methanol, thereby preventing the accumulation of toxic byproducts.

MSF: https://methanolpoisoning.msf.org/en/for-health-professional...

I can see the ambiguity of my comment. I was trying to phrase as a riddle but can be interpreted both ways.

by dnnddidiej

4/12/2026 at 9:03:27 AM

Same with antifreeze poisoning. If a kid drinks antifreeze, get him wasted to keep the liver busy.

by aqme28

4/12/2026 at 9:04:07 AM

ah got it. thanks for clarifying!

by froh

4/12/2026 at 8:50:05 AM

Distilling at home was fairly traditional long before high alcohol prices. Sure, high prices encourages some folks and helps ensure there is space for a black market. But technically, the high prices didn't cause distilling.

by Broken_Hippo

4/12/2026 at 5:33:13 AM

Anything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe.

I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.

by InvertedRhodium

4/12/2026 at 5:49:31 AM

This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.

Methanol is really only present in significant amounts in fruit mashes because it comes from fermentation of pectin. Grain or sugar-derived alcohol barely has any at all.

The foreshots you throw out do have things that taste bad and which you would not want to drink much of, but even if you mixed it all back in and got drunk, it would be the same amount of all of those chemicals you’d get if you just drank the mash, which is itself basically just beer or wine.

We distillers are a lot more likely to burn our house down than any other form of injury.

by mattmaroon

4/12/2026 at 6:44:58 AM

> This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.

Please do find those papers! They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with.

To be clear - methanol boils at 64C and ethanol boils at 78C. Are you suggesting that in standard distillation, there is still some non-trace methanol coming over at 78C? If I personally observed that in a laboratory setting, I'd quickly assume measurement error or external contamination.

by akersten

4/12/2026 at 10:14:58 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

Temperature is just an average, the individual molecules can have a higher or lower temperature and can therefore evaporate already below boiling point.

by lukan

4/12/2026 at 7:10:25 AM

I suspect that the vapor of the mash is always a mix of the components, and even above the boiling point of methanol, it still produces a mixed vapor. At room temperature, all of the components produce some vapor and will evaporate. This continues as the temperature rises.

It's not clear to me that simple distillation of a methanol/ethanol mixture can produce either pure ethanol or pure methanol at any point, just as it's impossible to distill ethanol and water to pure ethanol (absolute alcohol) if the water is above a small percentage of the mixture.

by avidiax

4/12/2026 at 9:45:39 AM

You can't distill out pure methanol, as at the boiling point of methanol ethanol also has some vapor pressure, so you distill a mix. However above that boiling point you distilled out all methanol (with a mix of ethanol), and the remaining ethanol should be free from methanol.

This also matches what gappens when distilling ethanol from water. You can't distill pure ethanol, but you csn distill ethanol-free water afterwards.

by leni536

4/12/2026 at 9:09:42 AM

Yup, distillation never produces a pure product. Cask-strength whiskeys contain quite a lot of water, even though nobody is stupid enough to distill at 100C. Even an industrial column still can't go over 96% ABV.

There is always some amount of vapor pressure, even below the boiling point of a substance. Otherwise, neither water nor alcohol would evaporate by themselves at room temperature! The temperature we call the "boiling point" is just the temperature at which the vapor pressure equals the ambient pressure.

by kijin

4/12/2026 at 9:00:33 AM

>They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with.

It's probably pot still vs. reflux still. Chemists use fractionating columns to get better separation. Home distillers won't necessarily do so, so official advice has to assume they will not.

by mrob

4/12/2026 at 7:20:40 AM

I would assume it depends on what you are distilling.

If you are making brandy from clarified wine, it probably separates better than rotten grape mash.

It is still a continuum with some methanol molecules likely remaining even in the tails.

For all intents and purposes, the distiller's rule of thumb of throwing away the angels' share is still going to work because low methanol concentrations are never an issue —for the antidote for methanol is ethanol.

by avadodin

4/12/2026 at 7:17:55 AM

I mean—depending how much methanol was in the mix to begin with…

It’s been a long time, but I thought there was a whole Raoult’s Law thing, about partial pressures in the vapor coming off the solution combining in proportion to each component’s molar fraction * its equilibrium vapor pressure (at that temperature, presumably). Or something.

Point being, if you’re starting with a bunch of volatiles in solution, there’d be quite a bit of smearing between fractions boiling off at any given temperature/pressure. And you’d be very unlikely to get clean fractions from a single distillation anywhere in that couple-dozen-degree range.

Probably mangled the description, but isn’t that why people do reflux columns?

by alwa

4/12/2026 at 7:09:54 AM

From what I understood ethanol and methanol form an azeotrope and boil together at a mixed temperature. And the going blind stuff is just prohibition propaganda both to make home distilled alcohol seem dangerous and to scapegoat the fact that the government was actively poisoning "industrial" ethanol.

by AngryData

4/12/2026 at 7:57:37 AM

this is dangerously wrong in several dimensions

methanol and ethanol do not form an azeotrope with each other, they only (both, each) bind to water. that's why separation of methanol and ethanol by holding key temperatures works at all.

furthermore, the azeotrope effect only becomes relevant at concentrations beyond 90% alcohol. so when you're producing pure methanol and ethanol, then distillation won't cut it beyond 90+% as water+(m)ethanol then *at these high concentrations* boil and evaporate together. that's the grain of truth in your statement.

last not least going blind from methanol is _very_ real.

by froh

4/12/2026 at 7:40:28 AM

> From what I understood ethanol and methanol form an azeotrope

I don't think so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope_tables

by morsch

4/12/2026 at 7:22:31 AM

Look at it this way: The boiling point of ammonia is -33 C. Would you drink a jug of household cleaning ammonia just because it's been heated to +20C?

But anyway, I don't think there's hazardous levels left after normal distillation+cutting, the reason for not buying booze from some guy behind a barn usually has more to do with lead contamination risks.

by anon_cow1111

4/12/2026 at 7:58:32 AM

I went to Bin Inn in Masterton NZ because it was supposedly where you could recycle a certain brand of glass jar. The guy running the place clearly had no idea what I was talking about but took them anyway because he was nuts. I was looking around the place a bit as I'd never been there before, not realising he was following me. I paused to read a bottle on the shelf and suddenly he was talking very loudly over my shoulder:

You shouldn't buy those, terribly expensive. Oh I don't really drin... Used to be a chap in here all the time, made his own, beautiful stuff. Ok well like I say I'm not rea... I can sell you everything you need, you should make your own gin, much cheaper. Oh, so did you drink his stuff too? Nah I'd never touch it. What but you said it was beau... Yeah he drank it and died.

Definitely up on the list of bizarre interactions I've had here.

by jemmyw

4/12/2026 at 6:26:25 AM

This doesn’t make sense. Whether or not you have methanol depends on what you are distilling from. Distillation doesn’t create methanol and many sources of ethanol contain negligible methanol.

TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.

by jandrewrogers

4/12/2026 at 7:34:54 AM

Everyone is talking in circles.

As distillation continues the concentration of methanol drops.

The highest concentration is at the start. This is also generally full of undesirable flavours.

People also forget that ethanol competitively inhibits metabolism of methanol in a way that protects healthy adults from toxicity.

A safe alcoholic drink can have methanol in it, iirc it's about 80:1 ethanol:methanol by EU rules. And generally considered tolerable [0].

What is actually toxic is much higher ratios of methanol than that.

Unless you have severely f'd up your fermentables you shouldn't even have that much methanol in the starter!

This is why everyone is disagreeing with the safety in this thread.

It's also why people wonder why so many tourist destinations have been mixing methanol into alcoholic drinks. They probably could serve drunk people high concentrations relying on ethanol already in their blood and follow up drinks to stop noticeable harm.

Probably most adults could drink 5-10% methanol (if ethanol is about 50%) and never notice the toxicity.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11926610/

by rustyhancock

4/12/2026 at 7:47:27 AM

Genuine q then. Why don't the destinations serve watered down shots instead? If it is just to save money.

by dnnddidiej

4/12/2026 at 7:54:07 AM

Good question, I think it's to get people drunk and buying more drinks.

As opposed to the crowd sobering up and leaving.

But also I believe the bar (staff) often genuinely don't know what their serving is harmful.

I should have added the limit to safety at low levels of methanol is actually that your body processes ethanol much faster than methanol. So it's more that the crowd goes home and then hours later (once ethanol has been cleared) the methanol finally is picked up by the enzymes that makes it toxic. If they stay drunk (on ethanol) for days the methanol might have been excreted before being toxified.

by rustyhancock

4/12/2026 at 9:17:32 AM

If places are really sketchy, they might be mixing in partially treated industrial or "denatured" alcohol, which has poisonous quantities of methanol and bitterants but are also like 90% ethanol

by aqme28

4/12/2026 at 7:54:47 AM

Probably because a- people can tell, and b- you sell more to already drunk people, so getting them drunk sooner is better.

So maybe the answer is water down the shots of your obviously drunk customers.

by rkomorn

4/12/2026 at 7:58:19 AM

Ah I didn't realise methanol had the same psychological effect. I thought it was just tasteless poison.

by dnnddidiej

4/12/2026 at 8:09:36 AM

I've never tasted it but from what I remember from high school chemistry class, it certainly smelled close enough to other alcohols, so I assume it would taste close enough as well.

TBH, I also had to do my own bit of googling because I barely drink alcohol to begin with, but it does look like "at the start", it's not very distinguishable from ethanol in taste and in effect.

by rkomorn

4/12/2026 at 8:55:18 AM

If ethanol and methanol were readily distinguishable by taste, much fewer people would have died or gone blind drinking moonshine.

Whatever subtle differences exist between them are probably unnoticeable to people who are already drunk, not to mention drinking cocktails with all sorts of other flavors mixed in.

by kijin

4/12/2026 at 6:48:47 AM

It seems to parse just fine? They create some unknown mixture of methanol/ethanol (who knows what the ratio is, who cares, like you said, depends what you're making it from) and then raise it past the boiling point of methanol, throwing away everything that comes over while still under the boiling point of ethanol. It sounds like basic distillation to me.

by akersten

4/12/2026 at 5:55:33 AM

>Anything that decants below 78.4C

do you mean distills? decanting is just pouring carefully

by fsckboy

4/12/2026 at 6:21:29 AM

Yeah. No idea why I wrote decant.

by InvertedRhodium

4/12/2026 at 7:23:40 AM

Thank you for asking, I was so confused.

by Mistletoe

4/12/2026 at 5:32:35 AM

I visited Norway and was blown away by the price of alcohol. Given that the sun only comes out for a fraction of an hour in winter I struggled to believe it. At a local bar... (I think I was in trondheim?) I asked how they afforded booze? (it worked out to 15$ USD per pint), "We don't, but we do it anyways"

by bobtheman

4/12/2026 at 8:52:42 AM

The real answer: Folks rarely get very drunk at the bar. Folks have drinks at home, go to the bar and drink modestly, and drink after.

And I'll let you know that my shortest days are 4.5 hours long (with weak sunlight!). Oslo has slighly longer days still.

by Broken_Hippo

4/12/2026 at 7:23:04 AM

Why is it so expensive? High vice taxes?

by somat

4/12/2026 at 8:42:02 AM

Yes. Wine with between 10-15% alcohol by volume[1] currently has a tax of 5,41 NOK per percent ABV per liter. So a typical 0.75 liter bottle of 12% ABV wine gets a tax of 12*0.75 = 53.19 NOK, or about $5.6 / €4.8.

For booze above 22% ABV the tax is currently 9.23 NOK. So a 0.7 liter bottle of 40% ABV Whiskey or similar would get 258 NOK or $27 / €23 in tax.

And on top of that comes the usual 25% VAT, and high wages to our bartenders etc.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume

by magicalhippo

4/12/2026 at 7:52:35 AM

Prices tend to correlate strongly with wages and wages are very high in Norway for all work, so they also have some of the highest prices on basically everything. Another lol example is a Big Mac combo meal in Oslo - you're looking at around $20.

by somenameforme

4/12/2026 at 8:49:36 AM

A large Bic Mac meal with plain fries and soda is 123 NOK or $12.91, and a large double Quarter pounder menu is 168 NOK or $17.63.

It's actually relatively cheap right now, I expect a price hike soon given how much grocery prices have increased.

by magicalhippo

4/12/2026 at 8:47:05 AM

Scandinavian countries have very specific alcohol policies, though, very restrictionist, and the tax is part of this.

This is not just question of "more expensive country, more expensive stuff". Switzerland or Luxembourg are quite expensive, but you will buy affordable and good Italian/Spanish/French wine there, because these countries don't impose anywhere near as much taxation on wine.

by inglor_cz

4/12/2026 at 5:54:28 AM

[dead]

by aaron695

4/12/2026 at 10:04:23 AM

I've been wanting to start an alchemical spirits company in Amsterdam. Does anyone have experience in this space?

by dr_dshiv

4/12/2026 at 6:22:25 AM

Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia. Outside the compound, the locally-distilled "sid" is on offer. Both varieties have been available for a half-century with no reports of poisoning.

by pseingatl

4/12/2026 at 7:04:52 AM

>Distillation of spirits is a necessary requirement for life on the Aramco compound in Saudi Arabia.

How so? For medical reasons? For the facilitation of the Saudi Aramco oil production which funds the life and habitation of humans in Dhahran?

I suspect something was lost in translation.

by ghastmaster

4/12/2026 at 7:35:32 AM

Saudi Arabia is a famously dry country in all meanings of the word, there's not much fun to be had as an expat unless you make your own.

by decimalenough

4/12/2026 at 7:45:59 AM

Why do you need to distill your spirits? If you really need alcohol, can't you drink undistilled beverages to have 'fun'?

by eru

4/12/2026 at 9:35:53 AM

Absolutely not

by none2585

4/12/2026 at 8:14:19 AM

How does Texas law affect the possibility of distilling in a Saudi compound? What’s the jurisdiction there?

by Jolter

4/12/2026 at 7:37:37 AM

Making their waaaaayyyy.. The only way they know how. But that's just a little bit more than the law would allow. Yee-haw!

by trick-or-treat

4/12/2026 at 5:20:39 AM

I always thought the reason was that badly distilled drinks were dangerous.

by d--b

4/12/2026 at 5:38:20 AM

That’s actually a common myth perpetuated by the American government during prohibition. The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch to blind people, then they told people they’d go blind from moonshine to discourage it.

Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them. The ratio of ethanol to methanol in a distilled spirit will be approximately the same as in the wash it was distilled from. Drinking brandy you’ll get about the same ratio as if you drank the wine it was made from.

You need the same amount of ethanol to get drunk regardless of how you drink it, all distilling does is get rid of that pesky water that’s in beer and wine. (That makes some other fun things like barrel aging possible.) So you’ll also get the same amount of methanol.

Also fun fact: if you got methanol poisoning and went to the hospital the treatment is ethanol, because it blocks the metabolism of methanol. Methanol metabolizes into formic acid which damages the optic nerve.

And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.

You’d have to try hard to seriously injure yourself drinking home distilled spirits. (I’ve been doing it for 15 years.) Unless you count just drinking too much, but you’d have that problem with the professional stuff too.

by mattmaroon

4/12/2026 at 6:25:11 AM

>And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.

This is wrong. The boiling point of methanol is 65C vs ethanol at 78C. Methanol will come out first from distillation.

by 3eb7988a1663

4/12/2026 at 6:44:40 AM

Yes

Oversimplified might be a better description but there needs to be a rule even dumb people can use

So the rule is: discard whatever comes first

If you expect every home distiller to understand the nuances of this you're going to end up with a lot of "accidents"

by raverbashing

4/12/2026 at 10:19:02 AM

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by redsocksfan45

4/12/2026 at 7:18:10 AM

Having seperate boiling points wont matter if they form into an azeotrope. Not all liquids can be distilled from one another even though every liquid has a different boiling point.

by AngryData

4/12/2026 at 7:42:30 AM

Ethanol and methanol don't form an azeotrope.

by jampekka

4/12/2026 at 10:19:23 AM

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by redsocksfan45

4/12/2026 at 9:05:37 AM

> The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch

how did that work? did the Feds pose as some false flag bootleggers? do you have some sources I could read up on?

thing is, russia has a large tradition of home distillation (samogonka), and they too have tropes of people going blind. there have been a lot of cases of people dying because of bad alcohol, here's somewhat recent case: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/contaminated-cider-deaths-russi...

by watt

4/12/2026 at 6:44:57 AM

"Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them." This doesn't sound quite right. Distillation concentrates alcohols as a function of their boiling points and the temperature. Heavier alcohols have higher boiling points so methanol will be distilled faster than ethanol. This means that it is can become more concentrated in the distillate. The idea that the relative proportion of compounds can change is the whole idea of distillation in the first place. To be fair, people have been distilling alcohols just fine for a few hundred years now so clearly this can be done safely with primitive technology. But is definitely possible to increase the methanol concentration relative to ethanol through distillation and it should definitely come off the still first if you just apply heat.

by blululu

4/12/2026 at 6:29:06 AM

Huh, I thought if you held the outlet of the still at 79c until you stopped getting distillate then you could be reasonably sure that you took out most of the the majority of the methanol.

by nik282000

4/12/2026 at 6:53:09 AM

You can. I think parent is using some technicality of how distillation is not going to get you to 100.0000% purity.

by 3eb7988a1663

4/12/2026 at 6:25:02 AM

Interesting one.

by frankzander

4/12/2026 at 6:14:37 AM

Experienced distiller here. This comment is spot on.

by awesomeusername

4/12/2026 at 6:05:23 AM

Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.

North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.

by retrac

4/12/2026 at 6:32:20 AM

>North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation.

I find it interesting that you have this notion. I was born in 1984. The history books in school were still implying that home distillation was dangerous. "Rot gut whiskey" "bath tub gin" are phrases that continue to come to mind when I think of the prohibition days.

No one I have ever met in all of the different levels of society here have had any strong disdain or distrust of home brewing or distillation. By the time of my upbringing, at least, the general population in the US was content with the alcohol laws. They are not aware of how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are. They are not aware of the post prohibition three tier system. They are consumers of alcohol not producers. That is what prohibition in the US did. "House wine" in the US is the wine a restaurant picks for cheap profits. "House wine" in the old days or in europe is wine you make at home. We, in general, lost that piece of culture with prohibition. It never disappeared in some parts of the country though. Appalachia moonshiners kept the tradition going in mind and spirit for the whole country.

If your statement was about other drugs, you would be spot on. Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata. Prohibition of other drugs is a different story for cultural reasons.

by ghastmaster

4/12/2026 at 9:44:49 AM

>Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata.

It's very difficult to ban something when even the police do it. I'm guessing that the number of cops who like a drink is somewhere around "most".

by razakel

4/12/2026 at 5:34:30 AM

In the modern world they don’t have to be. I’m not sure a bubbling still in every home is a great idea but they won’t be wood fired so that’s a start. You could also test alcohol cheaply these days for the poisonous alcohols.

Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free

by smackeyacky

4/12/2026 at 5:42:51 AM

That’s because they adulterate it with methanol. Methanol can be derived from natural gas cheaply. I wrote a long comment above about why this isn’t a risk with home distilling.

The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor. The fire codes for a distillery are very strict.

by mattmaroon

4/12/2026 at 6:01:13 AM

> The much bigger danger for home distilling is fire, as you have open flames and combustible vapor.

This would suggest that using induction heating would be significantly safer and have the possibility of precise temperature control. Is there any reason why home distilling does/does not do this?

by bsder

4/12/2026 at 6:09:13 AM

Electric heating does reduce the risk of fire, yes, and some of us do it. (It’s also just a lot easier than a turkey fryer.) I rigged a water heater element up for this purpose.

(Technically there actually isn’t temperature control in distilling, the temperature is just the boiling point of the mixture, which changes over time as the mixture changes from distillation, but you do control the heat input which effects the speed at which you distill. Tangential, but counterintuitive.)

The reason most don’t is just cost/practicality. You really need to have a fair bit of liquid to get good results. Like tenish gallons (~40L). You probably can’t fit a still that big on your stovetop (and you really want to do this outside anyway) and you’d need a 240v connection to provide enough heat. Your standard American wall outlet doesn’t provide enough juice.

But the standard 240v 50a you charge an EV with or, in my case, plug in your RV does. People run drier cords out a window too.

by mattmaroon

4/12/2026 at 8:35:03 AM

> Like tenish gallons (~40L).

Ah, that would do it. I was thinking this was like beer homebrewing and would be around a gallon.

Thanks for the info.

by bsder

4/12/2026 at 5:24:38 AM

well, poisonous.

normal hooch is dangerous, too.

by serf

4/12/2026 at 5:34:23 AM

I find this line of thinking fascinating considering how many things we do without a second thought (forced to drive for basic errands, etc.) that are orders of magnitude more dangerous.

Anyway, my point is that the people most at risk of poisoning themselves are those unfamiliar with the process. I'm pretty sure a ton of people were doing this anyway for non-commercial purposes without realizing an unenforced federal law even existed.

by sublinear

4/12/2026 at 7:36:18 AM

I'm sure availability of testing methods and equipment has come a long way since the 1860s. As well as quality and purity of materials.

by themafia

4/12/2026 at 6:04:34 AM

Meh, home distilled spirits are everywhere in Romania. I drank many many times home distilled spirits. They are not that dangerous.

by RealityVoid

4/12/2026 at 8:23:10 AM

This reads as authenticity Eastern European.

A colleague from the region explained to me that if the booze is cheap, you just make sure you drink plenty of good booze too. Blocks the metabolic pathway.

by lostlogin

4/12/2026 at 8:51:41 AM

Yes, that is true. But almost no one really does this, cutting the head is what is usually done and I have never heard of someone poisoning themselves with homemade țuică. It's fine, really. It seems USians are convinced homemade hooch will blind you without having absolutely no personal experience with it.

by RealityVoid

4/12/2026 at 9:46:05 AM

Here in New Zealand it’s legal, and I trade my honey for honey gin.

by lostlogin

4/12/2026 at 6:28:30 AM

How's your eyesight?

by ihalip

4/12/2026 at 7:27:19 AM

Depends what you make it from. If you distill eight litres of wine into about a litre brandy without removing methanol, it has the same amount of methanol than eight litres of wine did. Given the average of 150mg/l of methanol in red wine, this puts it to about 1g of methanol in that amount. That is not healthy, but you need to keep in mind ingestion of alcohol slows down the metabolism of methanol through competition and the methanol will be excreted by your kidneys instead of being metabolized.

So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.

by ane

4/12/2026 at 8:43:06 AM

Not great, but I'm not blind.

by RealityVoid

4/12/2026 at 8:50:44 AM

The eastern part of Czechia (Moravia) plus Slovakia will distill anything that grows, too, and methanol poisonings are almost non-existent here. Don't underestimate centuries of tradition and know-how.

The only exception was a methanol affair 15 years ago, but that had nothing to do with home distillation. In that particular case, two bozos inspired by a badly understood Wikipedia article bought and mixed enormous amounts of industrial methanol with ethanol and sold the resulting mixture on the black market, killing dozens of people and triggering a temporary prohibition as the authorities scrambled to find all the poisoned booze.

They are now both serving life.

by inglor_cz

4/12/2026 at 7:12:12 AM

Looks like they didn't see your comment

by jimnotgym

4/12/2026 at 5:52:13 AM

Awesome... time to get the moonshine flowing again!

by ardit33

4/12/2026 at 5:20:31 AM

Good! Now let's do civil asset forfeiture.

by briandw

4/12/2026 at 7:04:41 AM

Great. Now make it legal to grow ANY type of flower.

by dustractor

4/12/2026 at 7:06:41 AM

That (CSA) falls under regulating interstate commerce instead of tax powers. Picking up a flower and smoking it on the spot is interstate commerce thus i dont think this same idea applies.

by mothballed

4/12/2026 at 7:09:09 AM

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by s5300

4/12/2026 at 5:22:27 AM

FYI you can also grow psychedelic mushrooms at home in all 50 states legally. The precursors are legal

by monero-xmr

4/12/2026 at 6:11:58 AM

This is bad information. The precursors being legal doesn’t mean anything about the legality of producing scheduled drugs from them. The precursors for home distilling are also legal.

Possessing schedule I controlled substances is illegal. If you grow the substance, you also possess it. Therefore it’s not legal.

by Aurornis

4/12/2026 at 5:35:13 AM

I've bought grain spawn cubensis bags at head shops before. Super easy to grow.

Do be careful. Depending on the state mushrooms become illegal at different stages of production.

by tastyfreeze