That’s actually a common myth perpetuated by the American government during prohibition. The Feds added methanol to bootlegged hooch to blind people, then they told people they’d go blind from moonshine to discourage it.

Distillation doesn’t create alcohols, it only concentrates them. The ratio of ethanol to methanol in a distilled spirit will be approximately the same as in the wash it was distilled from. Drinking brandy you’ll get about the same ratio as if you drank the wine it was made from.

You need the same amount of ethanol to get drunk regardless of how you drink it, all distilling does is get rid of that pesky water that’s in beer and wine. (That makes some other fun things like barrel aging possible.) So you’ll also get the same amount of methanol.

Also fun fact: if you got methanol poisoning and went to the hospital the treatment is ethanol, because it blocks the metabolism of methanol. Methanol metabolizes into formic acid which damages the optic nerve.

And contrary to lore, mass spectrometry shows that the idea that methanol comes off the still first (meaning that if you collected the early results, called heads, and drank them, you might get too much) is false or at least drastically oversimplified.

You’d have to try hard to seriously injure yourself drinking home distilled spirits. (I’ve been doing it for 15 years.) Unless you count just drinking too much, but you’d have that problem with the professional stuff too.

Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.

North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.

In the modern world they don’t have to be. I’m not sure a bubbling still in every home is a great idea but they won’t be wood fired so that’s a start. You could also test alcohol cheaply these days for the poisonous alcohols.

Having said that, fake booze in Thailand has killed and blinded people so it’s not risk free

well, poisonous.

normal hooch is dangerous, too.

I find this line of thinking fascinating considering how many things we do without a second thought (forced to drive for basic errands, etc.) that are orders of magnitude more dangerous.

Anyway, my point is that the people most at risk of poisoning themselves are those unfamiliar with the process. I'm pretty sure a ton of people were doing this anyway for non-commercial purposes without realizing an unenforced federal law even existed.

Meh, home distilled spirits are everywhere in Romania. I drank many many times home distilled spirits. They are not that dangerous.

I'm sure availability of testing methods and equipment has come a long way since the 1860s. As well as quality and purity of materials.