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In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally. Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can
by fzeindl 5mo ago
In Norway alcohol is very expensive, so many people distill at home illegally.
Every travel guide tells you to not accept home-distilled drinks, since they can be poisonous.
- bobtheman 5mo agoI visited Norway and was blown away by the price of alcohol. Given that the sun only comes out for a fraction of an hour in winter I struggled to believe it. At a local bar... (I think I was in trondheim?) I asked how they afforded booze? (it worked out to 15$ USD per pint), "We don't, but we do it anyways"
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- somat 5mo agoWhy is it so expensive? High vice taxes?
- somenameforme 5mo agoPrices tend to correlate strongly with wages and wages are very high in Norway for all work, so they also have some of the highest prices on basically everything. Another lol example is a Big Mac combo meal in Oslo - you're looking at around $20.
- inglor_cz 5mo agoScandinavian countries have very specific alcohol policies, though, very restrictionist, and the tax is part of this. This is not just question of "more expensive country, more expensive stuff". Switzerland or Luxembourg are quite expensive, but you will buy affordable and good Italian/Spanish/French wine there, because these countries don't impose anywhere near as much taxation on wine.
- dgellow 5mo agoIf you’re in Romandie in Switzerland I would recommend local wines, that’s one thing the whole French speaking region is well known for (source: I’m from there)
- magicalhippo 5mo agoA large Bic Mac meal with plain fries and soda is 123 NOK or $12.91, and a large double Quarter pounder menu is 168 NOK or $17.63. It's actually relatively cheap right now, I expect a price hike soon given how much grocery prices have increased.
- somenameforme 5mo agoIs that in Oslo or elsewhere? Have prices gone down for some reason? EDIT: Ahh! I was basing my statement on data from quite a number of years back, and just assuming prices tend to go in one direction in inflationary economies. The nuance here is that the NOK has weakened somewhat dramatically against the dollar, so relative prices aren't quite as insane now as they were in the past.
- magicalhippo 5mo agoAh yes, back when the dollar was 7 NOK and not ~10 NOK, the Big Mac meal would indeed have been the equivalent of $20.
- magicalhippo 5mo agoYes. Wine with between 10-15% alcohol by volume[1] currently has a tax of 5,41 NOK per percent ABV per liter. So a typical 0.75 liter bottle of 12% ABV wine gets a tax of 12*0.75 = 53.19 NOK, or about $5.6 / €4.8. For booze above 22% ABV the tax is currently 9.23 NOK. So a 0.7 liter bottle of 40% ABV Whiskey or similar would get 258 NOK or $27 / €23 in tax. And on top of that comes the usual 25% VAT, and high wages to our bartenders etc. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume
- eudamoniac 5mo agoFuck's sake. I've bought some decent bottles of whisky all in for less than $27.
- Broken_Hippo 5mo agoThe real answer: Folks rarely get very drunk at the bar. Folks have drinks at home, go to the bar and drink modestly, and drink after. And I'll let you know that my shortest days are 4.5 hours long (with weak sunlight!). Oslo has slighly longer days still.
- InvertedRhodium 5mo agoAnything that decants below 78.4C is going to have methanol in it, I usually separate out the first 100ml or so that decants after 78.4C to play it safe. I've been doing it for about 20 years, no poisoning cases yet. Home distillation has been legal in NZ since 1996.
- mattmaroon 5mo agoThis 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.
- akersten 5mo ago> 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. Please do find those papers! They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with. To be clear - methanol boils at 64C and ethanol boils at 78C. Are you suggesting that in standard distillation, there is still some non-trace methanol coming over at 78C? If I personally observed that in a laboratory setting, I'd quickly assume measurement error or external contamination.
- AngryData 5mo agoFrom what I understood ethanol and methanol form an azeotrope and boil together at a mixed temperature. And the going blind stuff is just prohibition propaganda both to make home distilled alcohol seem dangerous and to scapegoat the fact that the government was actively poisoning "industrial" ethanol.
- aaron695 5mo ago[dead]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- frankzander 5mo agoAlcohol is always poisonous (but mixed with methanol quite a bit more poisonous ) :-)
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoAnd if you have one of those poisons the antedote is the other one. Edit: only one way round! This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I am not your doctor or drinking doula.
- froh 5mo agoyou suggest additional drinking methanol when you're "normally" drunk?? that's dangerously counterfactual.
- dnnddidiej 5mo agovice versa > Ethanol is the most commonly used antidote to block the metabolising of methanol. Ethanol works by competing with the metabolic breakdown of methanol, thereby preventing the accumulation of toxic byproducts. MSF: https://methanolpoisoning.msf.org/en/for-health-professionals/ https://methanolpoisoning.msf.org/en/for-health-professional... I can see the ambiguity of my comment. I was trying to phrase as a riddle but can be interpreted both ways.
- adzm 5mo agoNo, ethanol is an antidote to methanol
- Broken_Hippo 5mo agoDistilling at home was fairly traditional long before high alcohol prices. Sure, high prices encourages some folks and helps ensure there is space for a black market. But technically, the high prices didn't cause distilling.
- strus 5mo agoHome distillation is very popular in Poland too. Risk of getting poisoned from it is near zero in practice. In some parts of Poland there is more home-distilled alcohol bottles at the tables during weddings than commercial ones. In many European countries you will be offered home-distilled drinks, you would be very unlucky to get anything else than hangover. The problem is overblown.