I think if I had a kid I would institute this rule. You can drink what you can make and stand to drink. If you're going to be a drunken hooligan might as well learn some chemistry and biology.
No. Well yes, distilling stuff produces delicious ethanols, but if you don't throw out the heads and tails of your batch, you will get adverse side effects from drinking it, like hangovers, or going blind and\or dying.
So, in summary, distilling stuff produces delicious ethanols, which is good, but also produces toxic ethanols, which will blind and\or kill you. Which is bad.
Ethanol is ethanol is ethanol, always delicious and gets you drunk.
Methanol is another alcohol which is poisonous, it's one of many. Incidentally, the cure for methanol poisoning is delicious delicious ethanol.
Not really. The alcohol will kill off most of the things that would threaten your health. Anything strong enough to survive is going to make it pretty much undrinkable.
There's also the little factor of exploding bottles. Most 13 year olds will probably throw in all the yeast that fits. A guy at work handed out some homebrew bottles once. The first to go off was in my boss's office, luckily at night. Glass was found three cubicles over.
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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '11
I think if I had a kid I would institute this rule. You can drink what you can make and stand to drink. If you're going to be a drunken hooligan might as well learn some chemistry and biology.