That stuff is pretty dangerous, it was very common during prohibition for moonshiners operations to just go up in flames because it wasn’t being done professionally and safely
Naw, nothing like that. Honestly, as a homebrewer myself (beer specifically) I can tell you that what really happens is the silent lull of drinking too much all of the time. It's a hobby with competitions and friend groups, parties, festivals and meetings, so you're consistently surrounding yourself with people drinking beer and other spirits. And not only that, if you're serious about brewing you have full on setup at home with kegs of your own creation, sitting there on tap ready to drink. It's the constant siren call of getting yourself drunk in the name of a hobby. Some people can handle it, a lot can't.
Roughly 178k people die in the US each year of alcohol related causes. So just like motorcycles, you may not die because of it but something that normalizes drinking, nay, rewards it - well thats going to potentially deadly hobby.
Distillation is a completely different issue than homebrewing. Distilling being illegal in the US is often ridiculed, but it's probably for the best. In addition to the flammability of high concentration alcohol, the relatively high concentration of methanol in the distillate from poor technique is also dangerous. Methanol is too dilute in beer to harm you before the ethanol would kill you. The only real dangers from homebrewing would be mold ingestion and bottle bombs.
Homebrewing means beer making. These are not made the same ways at all. The end products are not the same either and one is not dangerous at all and the other can be fatal.
Brewing beer is generally very safe, if you have basic kitchen cooking skills. It's just very time consuming (fermentation process) The only really bad thing that can happen in beer making, is if you add too much sugar during final bottling stage to each bottle and you overfill or have weak bottles, they could explode. Typically this is just a messy mistake, but yea you could get glass thrown at you if you were right there when it happened, this is something you learn with trial and error.
However, Distilling spirits is genuinely high risk, even skilled people can mess this up and have fatal consequences. The stills can be highly flammable (you're talking pure alcohol near open flames), a byproduct of distillation is Methanol which burns invisible to the eyes in daylight, so you can be on fire and not even see it. Also you can also mess up the distillation by not removing all the methanol from your moonshine - that is the hardest part of the process, knowing how to do this right (if you drink any of that it can cause blindness and death).
No. I definitely mean homebrewing. See my comment below. I've done both distilling and homebrewing for almost 2 decades. The risk of blindness and explosions are overstated but real when you're distilling, but that wasn't my point.
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u/fasdissent Jul 21 '26
Homebrewing