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I've been to Laos several times. Most of the foreigners living there know not to drink the cocktails. In a country where people earn a couple of dollars per day there's just too much incentive to swap out the expensive imported spirits for the local version and pocket the difference.
Also, Beer Lao is really good.
The article keeps mentioning that the drinks could have been spiked, but that seems very unlikely and a weird way to poison someone, especially since there doesn't seem to be a motive or relationship between the victims.
what's much more likely, given it's Laos, is that the whiskey was poorly homemade and the bar sourced their whiskey from that. unskillful distiller, laotian whiskey is a cultural tradition and whiskey is pretty easy to make. all you need is a still, but if you keep all of the distillation, the beginning of the liquid coming out is methanol, which is very poisonous. after the methanol is gone then it's all ethanol, which is the alcohol you're used to drinking and is less poisonous.
it sounds like this was in a bar, so the supplier of the bar probably got lazy or didn't want to waste any of the distillate they were making and kept the methanol in through negligence or greed.
I've watched a good chunk of videos on moonshine at home, and for anyone interested in this further, most of them are pretty clear and you can see the difference between the methanol and ethanol when collecting.
The methanol is cloudy, so the first jar+ is collected and separated. After that the remaining is collected for drinking. I believe that some people will then dump the methanol in their next mash to distill it again and get some of the ethanol that was also collected with the methanol. It's a pretty neat, and simple process with huge implications.
I dunno, as I understand it getting enough methanol to kill from bad distilling is possible, but really easy to avoid. Even the most amateur distiller could avoid it... and they would probably avoid it since corpses are lousy repeat customers.
No, my guess would be is that someone in the supply chain was doing some minor fraud by adding some industrial ethanol and water to the the whisky. Add a bucks worth of industrial ethanol to a gallon of whiskey and boom, now you have two gallons of whiskey. It's gonna be mixed into drinks and sold to drunk tourists, and it probably tasted like crap to begin with, so who's gonna notice a slightly shittier flavor? Except this time somebody screwed up and got some de-natured alcohol rather then pure ethanol.
easy to avoid if you want to avoid it.
I think you have a higher regard for the stringent ethics of poverty-stricken moonshiners than I do.
but what you're saying certainly could have happened also.
Yeah home brew whiskey is a tradition there apparently according to a Bourdain vlog I saw some years ago. People have to be careful with that stuff.
I tasted it and immediately I had red flags go up in my mind, the bottles I tried(had to make sure) definitely tasted homemade and not completely divorced from methanol
Looks like the headline was updated to 5 deaths now. What a tragic end to what should have been a fun and memorable night out.