Home Distiller

God I love this forum!

Pretty cool that people are doing this sort of thing and then sharing it for the rest of us. And its REALLY nice to base conversations on hard data!!

What method was used for the analysis?

It's most likely a GC. This post is 9 years old, the poster hasn't been on six months and the last time he posted was in 2010 so a positive answer is unlikely any time soon.

Has anyone used a Coffee filter to actually try to collect fusel oils or is it too hard to collect ?

I had this most weird idea and I wanna ask if it is even possible to do in reality.

Consider that you you make a wash still followed by a spritit still with a stripping run to make cuts.
You dipose some foreshots and keep all the tails and heads.
Lets assume that you put all the fusel oils and run them several times through a coffee filter. All the methanol and the rubbing alcohol 2-prop would run straight throuch as the molecules are too small.
Then backflush the oil to collect aromas with some of the hearts and added water ( maybe from an earlier spent wash)
The backset + ethanol would dissolve the fusel oils again and make them suitable for a second redistillation.

Has anyone done this? Could it be done with a coal filter without getting the fusel oilis stuck inside the coal?

Fidget wrote:

Barney Fife wrote:Great to have hard numbers, but don't just look at the methanol, boys. Looks at the acetone numbers! Helluva lot more in the fores. 4 times more, in fact. 10 times more iso-butanol, nearly 10 times more iso-amyl alcohol, 35(THIRTY FIVE!) times more ethyl acetate, and so on and so forth. All of those are nasty, some nastier than methanol. YOU can keep your fores if you wish, but I'm not interested in the headache, tremors, puking, and paint thinner flavor, thank you very much. It may not kill you outright, but you may wish you were dead the next morning

More awareness needed on this for sure.

Barney Fife wrote: Seriously; methanol is what we are lead to believe is the nasty by-product of poor distillation practices, but there's an awful lot more ingredients that make up the nasties in the foreshots. It's just easier for the local news to say "Local man goes blind from drinking homemade moonshine that contained methanol". That doesn't make the newsguy right, does it?

Well said!

I wonder where you would find threads dealing with Redistilling feints and how copper reacts.
And which flavours are produced.

Does anybody know of testing labs in USA?

After COVID, many people were testing ethanol-based hand sanitizers for impurities (including methanol). So testing labs should be all over the place.

I'm interested in discovering which specific flavor (impurity) that I'm particularly sensitive. For beer, its DMS/DMSO. I can't stand some cooked vegetables because they catalyze DMSO production. I have to open the windows or leave the house! Once I identified that particular chemical, I can consistently identify it correctly. Somebody opens DMSO (commonly used as a solvent or vehicle in the lab), I can smell it across the room. So I'm wondering which molecule that I smell so strongly in ethanol production. Lab results would help.