I’m just putting this down here as it took me such a long time to get an answer to this same question. When I first looked into doing this the one thing I was really worried about was methanol poisoning. I know they say you only produce a little bit and all that, but the fact is that there was some produced and I was really worried about screwing up some variable in the process, like for too long or at the wrong temperature and accidentally making a whole batch of methanol rather than ethanol.

Well there’s a few details which people don’t talk about too much that cleared this all up for me. What confused me was that you ferment plants to make ethanol and I knew it was the sugar in the plants that form the ethanol, but what I didn’t realise was that while methanol is also made from plants it’s not the sugar that forms it, it’s actually a substance called pectin, which is found in the cell walls of plants. I assume that’s why wood is used to ferment for methanol, because it’s more fleshy and there’s more pectin. I also assume that’s why you don’t get any methanol using turbo-yeast, because the small amounts of methanol in regular fermenting are formed from the pulp of the plants and from the nutrient used.

So basically, if you’re sticking to regular sugar washes then it’s be a scientific breakthrough if you managed to give yourself methanol poisoning, just make sure you don’t accidentally buy sawdust instead of sugar.