How and why can homemade alcohol, like moonshine or rakija, make you go blind?
In: Biology
Like many things, alcohol may be entertaining; but ultimately it’s a calibrated poison. If you don’t have the knowledge to calibrate that properly you could end up harming yourself by failing to remove the “bad parts,” (methanol as other commenters have mentioned). It’s a matter of experience
As an example, think about cooking with wine. When you do that you need to reduce it, and as a short hand many recipes say “reduce by half.” What you’re actually doing here is removing the “bad part” (alcohol), just like when you’re manufacturing alcohol, so you’re left with the “good part” (flavor) available in the wine.
For home cooks it can be simplified to “reduce by half” because the stakes are low: worst case scenario you fuck up the flavor of your bourguignon, but that’s about it. If you don’t reduce it properly, the food might not taste as good, or on some small scale you might feel the effects of the alcohol.
For something like actually making alcohol, the stakes are far higher (e.g. blindness and death). Which is why playing with it absent the requisite experience is generally a bad idea; and why the warnings against doing so are so emphatic.
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