A U.S. appeals court on Friday declared unconstitutional a nearly 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling, calling it an unnecessary and improper means for Congress to exercise its power to tax.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in favor of the nonprofit Hobby Distillers Association and four of its 1,300 members.
They argued that people should be free to distill spirits at home, whether as a hobby or for personal consumption including, in one instance, to create an apple-pie-vodka recipe.
The ban was part of a law passed during Reconstruction in July 1868, in part to thwart liquor tax evasion, and subjected violators to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
So long as they’re doing it for personal use and being safe enough to not blow up the neighborhood, I don’t care. If they wanna sell for others to consume then obviously that’s a whole other thing.
It’s the “being safe enough” part that’s the problem. How do you regulate that? Do you really believe that the average American is capable of operating something as dangerous as a still in a completely safe manner?
If we were talking about homebrewing, yeah, absolutely, that shit is awesome and there is no good argument against. Home distilling is basically building a bomb and hoping that it doesn’t go off before you get wrecked enough on moonshine to notice it happening.
I have a neighbor who parks his stupid Cybertruck in his garage every day. Google “Tesla explosion”. Another neighbor has a Toyota overland build truck, he has an exposed 5 gallon propane tank on the back and 20 gallons of fuel tanks on the sides, it just sits there waiting to detonate. Google “Home gas explosion”. Another neighbor puts his Giant Turkey fryer on his balcony and frys a huge turkey every thanksgiving. Google “Turkey fryer explosion”. The old guy across from me home builds black powder rifles as a hobby. He has at least a 50 pounds of black powder stored in his workshop. Google “Black powder explosion”. The kids get picked up in a school bus with 100 gallons of CNG on it. Google "CNG explosion ". The 7-11 at the end of the block has an open cage filled with propane tanks, many returns that may not have the current safety valves on them. Minimum wage employees are in charge of this and the local crackheads stand right by it, smoking cigarettes. Google “propane tank explosion”. Most of the houses in my neighborhood were built 40-50 years ago, they all have water heaters. Many have no Tpr valve, improper venting, ect. Google “water heater explosion”. I guess you might be right, we need way more laws and regulations to protect us from from the bombs all around us.
Create safety standards for small commercially manufactured stills. Most people are lazy, so those will significantly outnumber more sketchy DIY stuff. We have safety standards for other dangerous items like propane tanks, and they reduce the risk to a level most people find acceptable.
There is no such thing. There’s a level of risk society finds acceptable. If a still can be as safe as a propane grill, I’m happy.
And if it could be as safe as a propane grill I would have no objections. But those things are orders of magnitude apart in terms of relative safety levels.
Do you have a source for that claim? I found this source suggesting otherwise; in New Zealand, where home distilling is legal and there wouldn’t be a reason to hide it, less than 0.14% of residential fires were caused by home distilling.
That’s honestly worse than I thought.
If you’re confused then this is a great object lesson in how to read statistics. Consider how many people actually own a home still in New Zealand. It’s not going to be a lot. Realistically, I think 1 in 10,000 would be a high estimate. That is to say, about 0.01% of the population. I’ve not had any luck finding actual numbers on that despite my best efforts, but I think it’s a fair assumption given the amount of specialised equipment involved in home distilling (much more so than home brewing), as well as the space needed to set it up and the time required for the for process. It’s not exactly set it and and forget it. In comparison, the percentage of people who live in a home who have a stove is going to be fairly close to 100%.
Already you can see the issue right? If 0.01% of a population are causing 0.14% of all home fires… That’s insanely bad.
But it gets worse. That study covers a 20 year period, but home distilling was only legal for the last 10 years of that period. Which means a couple of things. Firstly the number of home distillers would likely have been even lower for most of the period covered by the study. Home distilling would only really have taken off as a hobby over those last ten years, and for much of that time equipment would likely have been hard to come by; that’s not the sort of thing where import / manufacturing and distribution are going to be easy to just set up overnight. Secondly, home distilling as a cause of fire was likely under-reported for those first ten years as people would have a strong incentive to hide the cause of the incident. By far the single biggest category of equipment listed in the study is “Not recorded” accounting for more than all the other categories combined. Obviously, there’s going to be a distribution of all the other equipment types throughout that “Not recorded” block, but it’s not all unlikely that the “Not recorded” stats for illegal home stills would be at least slightly higher than for most other equipment.
Then there’s a second factor to consider; frequency of use. People often cook on a stove at least once a day. In comparison I very much doubt the average home distiller is running their still every single day. It’s a time consuming process that requires a fair amount of attention. Generally you’re going to make a batch and then consume that batch until you eventually need to make another. If we were to normalize not only for frequency of ownership but also frequency of use, it’s not hard to arrive at a fair estimate that home stills are causing fires at a rate of several hundred times that of, say, the average gas stove, based on the numbers in that study. Obviously I’m being pretty loose here, but I’m just trying to illustrate the general point. I’m not claiming to be presenting hard data here, I’d have to really sit down with the raw numbers and run a proper normalization, as well as get some stats not accounted for in that study, but yeah, overall, I’m feeling very good about my “orders of magnitude” estimate if the numbers you’re presenting are accurate.
(Also, it probably goes without saying that getting your statistics on how dangerous making moonshine is from a webpage entitled “Making Moonshine is Safer Than You Think” maybe isn’t the best idea. I’m fairly sure pedophiles also have strong opinions about the relative safety of taking candy from people in unmarked vans.)
My grandma did it for decades and didn’t blow anyone up. Nobody went blind either. You make it sound like it’s making a McNuke in your kitchen
Yeah man, its not that hard to do. I remain unexploded having cobbled together my “still”.
My great uncle Joe survived the entirety of WW2 despite being thrown into some of the worst fighting imaginable. This proves that war is completely safe for everyone involved.
I get the n=1 argument, but there are many people who have successfully done it safely. The government’s job is just to make sure the equipment you buy is safe enough, not to protect you from every dangerous choice in life
You know freedom means you can blow yourself up… not everyone lives in an apartment complex
looks at instant pot
Y-you know…