This is actually a myth. I’ll have to see if I can find the papers I read but mass spectrometry has shown that methanol comes out throughout the entire process. The idea that things come out at their boiling temperature is a drastic oversimplification.

Methanol is really only present in significant amounts in fruit mashes because it comes from fermentation of pectin. Grain or sugar-derived alcohol barely has any at all.

The foreshots you throw out do have things that taste bad and which you would not want to drink much of, but even if you mixed it all back in and got drunk, it would be the same amount of all of those chemicals you’d get if you just drank the mash, which is itself basically just beer or wine.

We distillers are a lot more likely to burn our house down than any other form of injury.

I went to Bin Inn in Masterton NZ because it was supposedly where you could recycle a certain brand of glass jar. The guy running the place clearly had no idea what I was talking about but took them anyway because he was nuts. I was looking around the place a bit as I'd never been there before, not realising he was following me. I paused to read a bottle on the shelf and suddenly he was talking very loudly over my shoulder:

You shouldn't buy those, terribly expensive. Oh I don't really drin... Used to be a chap in here all the time, made his own, beautiful stuff. Ok well like I say I'm not rea... I can sell you everything you need, you should make your own gin, much cheaper. Oh, so did you drink his stuff too? Nah I'd never touch it. What but you said it was beau... Yeah he drank it and died.

Definitely up on the list of bizarre interactions I've had here.

>Anything that decants below 78.4C

do you mean distills? decanting is just pouring carefully

This doesn’t make sense. Whether or not you have methanol depends on what you are distilling from. Distillation doesn’t create methanol and many sources of ethanol contain negligible methanol.

TBH, your assertion reads like chemistry word salad. It doesn’t parse.

Hey I've been wanting to get into home distilling for years but haven't found any good resources to start. Do you know of any books or other print resources that I should look at to learn what I need to learn before starting?