Do this one next:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

The Supreme Court somehow held that the feds can regulate what you do in your own home (in this case, growing marijuana for personal use) because it could have a butterfly effect on the interstate price. (Constitutionally, the feds can only regulate _interstate_ commerce.)

Missed in the previous discussion: methanol is irrelevant. Grain based ferments have essentially zero methanol.(And methanol risk is a function of its concentration relative to ethanol — the treatment for methanol poisoning is… ethanol!) even fruit based fermentations with significantly higher pectin concentrations only produce trace methanol, and it’s not all that well concentrated in a distillation due to azeotropes (which also says that throwing out the heads doesn’t help that much).

Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol. The biggest risk in home distilling is fire.

  > [Judge Edith Jones] also said that under the government’s logic, Congress could  criminalize virtually any in-home activity

Well, yeah. This is essentially the holding in Wickard v. Filburn, which seems to be in tension with this decision (overturning that would be great but it’s not the role of the circuit courts of appeal to do preemptively)

Decisions like this illustrate what a hollow farce the modern federal courts’ approach is to Constitutional governance.

To be clear, courts are not supposed to change policy or make new policy, they are just supposed to interpret the law as written.

So supposedly this ruling is “not a change in the law” but rather a discovery that actually the law has always been this way but oops, someone read it wrong 158 years ago and literally everyone has read it wrong for the ensuing 158 years.

Until now, when an unusually wise and discerning small group of people finally read things the right way.

I strongly support the substance of this decision, the ban was stupid overreach. But I also recognize that decades of agreeing with the substance of similarly silly “discoveries” has created a situation where federal judges have essentially infinite leeway to inject their own opinions into the law under cover of “wow, I finally discovered the correct interpretation” (no matter how tortured).

Reposting my comment from the last thread:

For those wondering, the opinion[0] doesn't address the Commerce Clause power (and Wickard and Raich) becaue the government abandoned that argument. See footnote 5.

The Commerce Clause issue is raised in our other case[1] that's now pending before the Sixth Circuit.

(I argued both cases.)

[0] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-10760-CV0.pd...

[1] https://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/issues/detail/ream-v-us-dep...

Bought and rigged up a 'hand sanitizer plant' about five months into COVID. Populated the thing with thermocouples, load cells and automation with nodered on raspberry pi and a bunch of esp32s flashed with tasmota doing sensing and control. Everything talked over mqtt. Great little architecture and having it highly automated allowed me to focus on the parts that were less easily controlled for.

Dashboard: https://imgur.com/a/so7iZJX

Sanitizer run: https://imgur.com/a/iWDlNfb

Quite a lot of fun actually.

The best liquor I ever had was by a state police detective who had been home distilling since he was 12. It was made from rye and corn, but tasted like peaches.

I think it is kind of magical to witness the process. I only experimented a few times, and never aged it, so every was very sharp. The best was a sharp brandy made from a bottle of wine I bought. The worst was using a leftover keg of beer, which bittered the copper pipe, so everything after tasted like gin.

I would recommend people try it. You can make one out of copper pipe from a hardware store, a few fittings and a pressure cooker. Be safe, of course, and remember that ethanol is used as a preventative for methanol poisoning :)

It's been way too long since I've taken a political science course, but does this mean that the ban is struck down for the entire country, or just the area that the 5th Court of Appeals covers?

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736298

The substantial issue is not "unconstitutional" or "revenue", but instead "corporate protectionism". The elephant in the room.

There are certainly concerns about home distillation. The question is whether We address those concerns uniformly or whether protections of "tax revenue" is really protection for corporate interests.

We live in a time of toxic corporatism. Not all corporations are toxic, but those who prioritize their interest over the common good are indeed toxic. Everyone has the right to use nicotine and smoke cigarettes. You can buy them - if old enough - anywhere. But the use of cigarettes is toxic. As are vapes. But some corporations believe that their wealth is worth all the early deaths and health costs that a lifetime of smoking brings.

It is the behavior of these corporations that is the issue here. Those who take the Friedman Doctrine to toxic extreme. The courts have promoted these greedoconomy by enacting United vs FEC and other anti-democratic policies. In contravention of their duty.

Corporate interest have become so powerful that we have become a corpocracy rather than a democracy.

Jeff Bezos has "Democracy dies in the dark" as the motto of the Washington Post. Democracy dies with the Friedman Doctrine and United vs FEC. Thanks Jeff and to all of the other corporate overlords.

The US refused to defend the Commerce Clause, so the circuit court did not consider it, though the Commerce Clause precedent would have likely demanded a different result.

This is circuit split engineering by the administration, meant to allow the Supreme Court to overrule its precedent on the Commerce Clause or whatever.

As I understand it, this only applies to the three states in that district, all of which also have statewide bans against it.

My state (Missouri) has the most lax home distilling state laws in the nation, which allow residents to produce up to 500 bottles per year. Well, at least theoretically, since the federal ban takes precedence.

Might as well plug this recent Criminal Podcast episode: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-358-the-formula-3-27-2026

TLDL: During prohibition, US government required adding 5% methanol to industrial alcohol, hoping that this would stop bootleggers from selling it as liquor. It was sold anyway, resulting in many deaths.

Great - but this will only until home distilling becomes popular in which case they will find a new reason to prohibit it. A company will produce a home-distilling gizmo with a fancy screen and app to go with it. They will raise some few $M's and have news articles written. Probably there will be a subscription consumable of some kind. Then there will be some bad press and they will make it illegal and the fancy home distiller will become useless do to a lack of software updates.

I had no idea this was even a law!!! Where do I turn myself in?

Homebrewing beer and wine was illegal at the federal level until 1978, and the sky didn't fall when that changed. Distilling is the same kind of personal-use activity — the main difference is that the law just never caught up. Good to see the courts pushing this forward.

The post '86 machine gun ban relies on basically the exact principle overturned here.

If you have a stock pot, a steel bowl that is large enough to sit on top of the stock pot, and a Pyrex measuring glass, you can start distilling now.

Put the glass in the center of the pot. Fill the pot with not enough mash to float the glass. Top the pot with the bowl. The condensate will form on the bowl and run towards the bottom center of the bowl, where it will drip into the glass.

I was able to distill a few bottles of home made apple wine that I had screwed up some additional flavorings on. It took a couple of hours for 3 or 4 bottles.

You'll have to do your own research on the finer details of making this work. I figured it out from first principles in the middle of doing it, so it's not that hard. Hell, people have been distilling for centuries, before they even knew what caused fermentation. Anything pre-Industrial Revolution peasants could do, I should be able to figure out in my modern house full of power tools. I'm not here to teach you how to do this, just inform that it's possible with equipment you likely already have.

Do not drink, fight the calories.

Have a beer for that news!

It'll be interesting to see how many people get methanol poisoning from trying their hand at it without doing the research properly. That being said, so long as it's for private or non-profit use, I don't really see the harm here.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736298

they also need to strike down the state laws restricting collection of rainwater on you own property.

how...uh...explosive...are home stills?

[flagged]

Big beer head Kavanaugh and Kegseth are probably jumping for joy.