Ah my bias: I was only interested in grain mashes. My immediate reaction was, “why on earth would there be wood in your mash?” The answer is fruit stems. Methanol will be differentially in the foreshot but if you’re not expecting much because you’re not fermenting any wood, it’s going to be low in the foreshots and very low in the hearts, but not much anywhere. BUT if you’re fermenting something with woody stems, I can see that methanol removal is going to be worthy of consideration.

one purpose of distillation is separating them

The purpose of distillation in this context is ethanol concentration. Methanol separation is possible but not really the goal.

Thats why you have to remove the foreshot

I don’t think the foreshots have a particularly higher concentration of methanol, other nasty stuff sure, but I think methanol is in pretty similar concentration to the ethanol.

An incompetent distiller can still cost you your eyesight or even life.

My understanding is that it’s people cutting the ethanol with industrial intoxicants that gets people injured/ killed. Ie people recklessly adulturing the alcohol.

The only problem I’ve heard of that’s from distilling itself and not intentional contamination is people doing freeze distillation of ciders (skin on).

That said, most of my reading has been with respect to pot stills and grain beers, maybe fermenting fruits create more methanol than grains, I still think intentional contamination with who knows what is higher on the risk list than accidentally high methanol concentrations. But if you know of specific cases I’d be happy to read them.

Edit: my view has been substantially altered. Due to my existing bias towards all grain mash, I hadn’t considered the possibility of woody material fermentation on methanol creation. I still believe negligent adulteration is more of a risk than negligent distillation, but negligent distillation is not a totally irrelevant risk.

My investigations into home distilling convinced me that distillation doesn’t convert ethanol into methanol. Moonshine poisoning is the result of adulteration of the product, (mixing it with other intoxicants) not bad distillation.

Basically sometimes people put other stuff in moonshine to reduce their costs, or give a special buzz. There’s no guarantee that the adulterant to be concerned about is methanol.