Distilling methanol out of beer?

There are few things more miserable than a bad hangover. A significant contributer of hangovers is methanol, also known as wood alcohol, which in large quantities can cause blindness.

So I think to myself... what if you could remove the methanol from your beer. It would be easy enough to do, as any bootlegger would tell you the first 50-100 ml of distilled alcohol that comes out of a still must be thrown out as it is almost entirely methanol. This is because the boiling temp of methanol (64C/147F) is significantly lower than that of sweet, delicious ethanol (78C/172F).

My question is then- how would boiling off the methanol out of a beer (after fermentation is complete, but before bottling or kegging) affect the final product? It's probably fairly safe to say that the heat will materially affect the flavor and other characteristics of the beer, but would it go as far as to ruin the beer? Commercial breweries often pasteurize beer at 140F, not that much below the temperatures that would be required to get out much of the methanol (although exposure to such temperatures would be more prolonged).

Has anybody tried this?

Boiling off and distilling are two different things.

Please lets not get into discussions about home distilling.

To be clear, I am not suggesting a process that involves using a still or in any way collecting the boiled off vapors. I only bring up distillation/bootlegging as the source of inspiration for this idea. Really the only piece of equipment you would need is an accurate thermometer (and a stove of course).

You mean boiling off then rather than distilling.

sammykap said:

There are few things more miserable than a bad hangover. A significant contributer of hangovers is methanol, also known as wood alcohol, which in large quantities can cause blindness.


Has anybody tried this?

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Have you considered drinking less beer? That's a far more practical solution IMO.

I think the boiling points of methanol and ethanol are close enough that trying to boil off any methanol will also remove a significant percent of your ethanol. Simply boiling your beer in a kettle, you won't be able to get an accurate measurement of the temperature of the vapors coming off. You would need a pretty good still to determine whether you're removing methanol, ethanol, or water.

Hangovers are caused by more than just methanol. I don't think it's worth the trouble of removing it.

There is very little methanol in beer, plus hangovers are mainly caused by the acetaldehyde produced by the liver as it metabolizes ethanol.

sammykap said:

To be clear, I am not suggesting a process that involves using a still or in any way collecting the boiled off vapors. I only bring up distillation/bootlegging as the source of inspiration for this idea. Really the only piece of equipment you would need is an accurate thermometer (and a stove of course).

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Anti thread locking mechanism ---DEPLOYED!!

I think there is a lot more that goes into a hangover. Dehydration, withdraw, and your body generally saying **** YOU!!!

If there were a way to make hangover-less beer, I'm sure a BMC company would have figured it out long ago.

Drink as much water as you do beer, eat a banana (potassium) and take a couple aspirin with more water before bed.

Wine has a lot more methanol than beer. I can't imagine this would really help. Though, if you remove most of the alcohol by heating to 172*F for 45 minutes it's a good bet you will get fewer hangovers!

Saccharomyces said:

Wine has a lot more methanol than beer. I can't imagine this would really help. Though, if you remove most of the alcohol by heating to 172*F for 45 minutes it's a good bet you will get fewer hangovers!

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Exactly. And just yummy beer and wine.

I do something similar on wine and cider to prevent methanol hangovers. I boil pasteurize the fresh juice for a couple minutes and then bottle back in the original jugs. Here is the important part. Then I refrigerate it and drink it as quickly as possible. Zero hangovers.

I think the issue is less whether not it is viable to "boiloff" the methanol, but more what damage would you do to your beer raising its temperature high enough to boil off the methanol...

I think this is a recipe for bad beer.
I don't think it will reduce hangovers, either.

Rick500 said:

Drink as much water as you do beer

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I just read the other day that drinking diet coke/whiskey will get you drunker quicker than reg coke/whiskey because of the sugar content. Apparently, the sugar in reg coke slows down the body's absortion of alcohol.

If you are drinking water to the point you are too full to drink anything else, it might work, but taking small glasses of water in between each beer could potentially lower the sugar content in your gut and speed up absorption. I usually wait until the end of the night to chug some H2O.

You are going to boil off other alchohols as well. The beer will not taste like beer.

If you want to drink more beer with less hangovers, brew a mild or breakfast stout.

I don't know why this hasn't been mentioned, but its possible to get a killer hangover from properly distilled spirits, which should contain no, or very little methanol.

Go for it !

Or we can all just guess for another 100 posts or so

Heat up a couple a litres to start with, and see if it tastes better or worse afterwards, maybe it is like aging ? who knows,....

Do let us know,....



(breakfast stout ? that just sounds sooo wrong,.. I have to brew one )

Edcculus said:

I don't know why this hasn't been mentioned, but its possible to get a killer hangover from properly distilled spirits, which should contain no, or very little methanol.

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word......

yeah... ethanol causes hangovers to. Better stick to NA.

For reference purposes, the boiling point of methanol is ~65C and of ethanol is ~78C

With such a small amount of methanol in a 5 gal batch, it's not practical to use heat to get it out. If you aren't controlling your ferment temps properly, it's most likely the higher alcohols (i.e. octanol) that are giving you a killer hangover.

Also, try popping a B-complex vitamin before you fall asleep. Sure you pee funny colors, but its worked wonders for me.

Make a low gravity beer and dump in some good grain alcohol
to bring up the % it works fine. or just go with a beer and a shot and make it simple. mmmmmmm where did this thread come from
and what am i doing

You will definitely damage and/or kill off your yeasts, so you better be kegging.

It isn't the methanol that's giving you a hangover with beer. With wine or other fruit mashes this might be the case. In any case you wouldn't pull off much methanol until the mixture boils which for 7% abv is around 200degC. This would ruin the beer.

Other than ethanol being a poison, dehydration and the contribution from bigger alcohols like butanol/pentanol would likely be contributors. Belvedere tonic anyone? (JK)

I would say that if this were possible, and it would work to make hangover-proof beer... people would've already been doing it. Just my opinion on it.

StMarcos said:

In any case you wouldn't pull off much methanol until the mixture boils which for 7% abv is around 200degC.

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What the hell are you talking about?

No. That is just 100% wrong.

StMarcos said:

In any case you wouldn't pull off much methanol until the mixture boils which for 7% abv is around 200degC

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ummm.... 200 degrees C equals 392 degrees F...

bhatchable said:

ummm.... 200 degrees C equals 392 degrees F...

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even 200F is very wrong.

Oops I did mean 200F. What's wrong with that?

StMarcos said:

Oops I did mean 200F. What's wrong with that?

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Ethanol boils at 173F. Methanol boils at 148 and water boils at 212. Think about that, it was already mentioned in the first post.

z987k said:

Ethanol boils at 173F. Methanol boils at 148 and water boils at 212. Think about that, it was already mentioned in the first post.

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It is not quite as simple as this. This is true for pure compounds, but make a mixture and it gets complicated. Even though water boils at 100 C, when you boil a water alcohol mixture at the boiling point of Ethanol, what one collects after the condenser will contain 5% water, even though the temp is 22 C below the boiling point of water. This is known as an azeotrope. For a water:ethanol mix, the ratio is 5:95. This is why you can only get to 190 proof with a simple distillation.

So the ethanol in a 7% ABV brew will boil off when 78 C is reached taking some water with it. Once all of the ethanol is gone, the temperature will go up to 100 C and the rest of the water will start to boil off

pjj2ba said:

It is not quite as simple as this. This is true for pure compounds, but make a mixture and it gets complicated. Even though water boils at 100 C, when you boil a water alcohol mixture at the boiling point of Ethanol, what one collects after the condenser will contain 5% water, even though the temp is 22 C below the boiling point of water. This is known as an azeotrope. For a water:ethanol mix, the ratio is 5:95. This is why you can only get to 190 proof with a simple distillation.

So the ethanol in a 7% ABV brew will boil off when 78 C is reached taking some water with it. Once all of the ethanol is gone, the temperature will go up to 100 C and the rest of the water will start to boil off

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Exactly. It would take a cloumn still of some kind with a carefully controlled temp gradient to get 100% of the methanol to the head at the top of the column, with lower temps lower in the column to recondense the water and ethanol that evaporate with the methanol. The final beer would have a flavor I would not expect to find pleasing.

I suppose one could pour a 12 ounce beer into a sauce pan and hold it at 148F for 15 minutes or so to get out "a lot" of the methanol.

Some of the revenuers I met while setting up an ethanol fuel still would think of even that 12 ounce experiment as "concentrating alcohol", a federal felony, as the final ethanol content of the brew would be raised if your technique was any good.

Better, and legal, to invest in a fermentation temperature controller system, I get milder hangovers from my HB than I do from commercial stuff, glass for glass.

according to Wikipedia Methanol isnt even mentioned as one of the root causes of hangovers. The top 2 are from ethanol:

Ethanol has a dehydrating effect by causing increased urine production (diuresis), which causes headaches, dry mouth, and lethargy. Dehydration also causes fluids in the brain to be less plentiful. This can be mitigated by drinking water after consumption of alcohol. Alcohol's effect on the stomach lining can account for nausea.

Another factor contributing to a hangover are the products from the breakdown of ethanol via liver enzymes. Ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, and then from acetaldehyde to acetic acid by the enzyme acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. Acetaldehyde (ethanal) is between 10 and 30 times more toxic than alcohol itself,[5] as well as being cocarcinogenic (not carcinogenic solely by itself) and mutagenic.[6]

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With a compound reflux still you are separating the components in the column before boiling off the component in question and condensing it. With methanol you would be talking about boiling just the methanol so the temperature before the condenser would be that of the boiling point of methanol - 65C.

The original poster was talking about a 'still' with one theoretical plate, a pot still, so you would be boiling a mixture, not 'pure' methanol. Because the methanol is a small component compared to the ethanol and water, you can assume it is just water and ethanol. A 7% ethanol : water solution would boil around 200F.

pjj2ba said:

It is not quite as simple as this. This is true for pure compounds, but make a mixture and it gets complicated. Even though water boils at 100 C, when you boil a water alcohol mixture at the boiling point of Ethanol, what one collects after the condenser will contain 5% water, even though the temp is 22 C below the boiling point of water. This is known as an azeotrope. For a water:ethanol mix, the ratio is 5:95. This is why you can only get to 190 proof with a simple distillation.

So the ethanol in a 7% ABV brew will boil off when 78 C is reached taking some water with it. Once all of the ethanol is gone, the temperature will go up to 100 C and the rest of the water will start to boil off

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No, you can't boil a water and ethanol solution at the boiling point of ethanol. It will boil at the boiling point of the mixture. In your second paragraph, you are talking about separating the components through many prior distillations in a column in equilibrium, and vaporizing only one of them before condensation. And you are talking about the temperature of the vapor at the point of take-off, not the temperature of the solution (beer). Holding beer at the boiling point of methanol will hasten evaporation of methanol (as it would 10deg below or above this T), but it will also hasten the evaporation of ethanol and water. You would loose plenty of ethanol along with the methanol.

And the azeotrope has nothing to do with the question at hand....

Lets just say it's a bad idea for many reasons and it would not work.

Want less hangovers them may I suggest sensible and moderate drinking.

For the wayward high school chemistry student that wanders onto this forum from a Google search, it bears saying that all those boiling points are at sea level. Up here it's down around 204 F for water (according to my uncalibrated brew thermometer).

There is very little methanol in beer, if any at all. There is only methanol in distilled grains because of crude mashing techniques and certain yeasts strains used. Keep in mind our beer yeast can not ferment cellulose, nor is there enzymes present(cellulase) to break it down to fermentables. If there were cellulase present in our grains the plant would decompose it's husks naturally.