Fruit Washes -- Do We Have Methanol All Wrong???

[DaveK]

I was doing a little internet dive on making spirits from fruit, and discovered that one of the issues with fruit-based spirits is that they tend to have a relatively high methanol content compared to other wash bases. And then I ran across this article https://encyclopedia.pub/10419 that discusses the reasons for elevated methanol in fruit washes, as well as various measures to mitigate methanol as a fermentation product and in distilled product.

Two things they recommend are not what we usually see in preparing washes... very low pH, and very low temperature for the fermentation. They also claim that our efforts to eliminate methanol from distilled product are somewhat futile; because of the complex relationship between ethanol, methanol, and water, the methanol actually comes through throughout the distillation run, and our efforts to eliminate it in the heads are somewhat futile. The "nasty" stuff that we are getting rid of in the heads is not the nearly tasteless methanol, but acetaldehyde and ethyl acetate, according to the article.

Anyway, I thought it to be a very interesting article, and would hope that anyone knowledgeable in this might chime in to comment.

And yes... there's a link in here, and I hope I did it right, and I hope the moderator lets it through.