#1
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Toilet wines, crab-apple ciders, instant pot mead or just whatever sort of half-poisonous swill you've made yourself: share it all with as much or as little information as you want.
Made a THC-infused tea kolsch (to disguise the taste of drinking about two ounces of vegetation all told) and it certainly gets the job done. Lagered for 4 weeks but didn't come out clear sadly.

#2
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that's good colour and really not that cloudy for a homebrew. nice work!

the notorious first batch I made with a couple friends when we were like 20, made the classic beginner mistake of overcomplicating everything. tried to make a chocolate stout, handmilled the grains ourselves, measured very diligently but then just kind of eyeballed an arbitrary amount of cocoa powder, wound up with 20% alcohol mud the consistency of a cream liqueur that was surprisingly palatable but definitely not what one would call a success.

we still get together to brew up something simple now and then but we play pretty fast and loose, usually end up with fairly low quality. having the option to distill failures into success makes us lazy.
#3
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Distilling at home seems like it would be fun but that extra risk of methanol poisoning seems not ideal
#4
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i mean if you throw away early boiling fractions and mix everything up afterwards its pretty much impossible to get more than 1:20 methanol:ethanol which is just beyond the sweet spot between delicious methanol fruit brandy type aroma and acute toxicity. if you're really paranoid ferment clean fermentable sugars with known commercial yeasts to minimize methanol production. in a home setting i'd be more concerned about blowing up the still
#5
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its not something I would have done on my own, learned under the tutelage of a professional chemist who built our distilling column. made separating out the methanol and heavier alcohols very easy.

we reduce risk doing small batches at relatively low pressure (which wastes some of the alcohol) but explosion is still a small possibility. something you gotta be Very Careful about. I wouldn't recommend someone just try to teach themselves, that's dangerous
#6
UNUSUALY COOL
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methanol poisoning is a power move to protect yourself from the Andromeda Strain
#7
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shriekingviolet posted:

its not something I would have done on my own, learned under the tutelage of a professional chemist who built our distilling column. made separating out the methanol and heavier alcohols very easy.

we reduce risk doing small batches at relatively low pressure (which wastes some of the alcohol) but explosion is still a small possibility. something you gotta be Very Careful about. I wouldn't recommend someone just try to teach themselves, that's dangerous



All of the BIAB systems I checked out all have like $100 still attachments, and even the basic lids in the beermaking equipment barely fit correctly (I assume because the different models all have small iterative changes and the spare parts get mixed and matched), which definitely means that there are about 20 square kilometres of potential arsonists in every gentrified neighbourhood.