How and why can homemade alcohol, like moonshine or rakija, make you go blind?
In: Biology
To make drinkable ethanol booze, you ferment stuff and then distill out the ethanol. But fermenting doesn’t just produce ethanol. It can produce a lot of other chemicals including methanol, especially from fruit stock high in pectin. Methanol is poisonous, it will blind you.
To avoid this you stick to stocks that don’t have pectin or have low pectin, and you should use fractional distillation and make cuts. You can do this with pot distillation, but you’ll need to throw out a lot more to be safe. Basically, you get four parts as you raise the temperature. The problem is there is no clear line of you get X, temp goes up you get Y. It blends together, so there are stages with safety margins.
* Foreshot: Nearly pure poison, discarded.
* Head: Ethanol with some methanol and other bad tasting stuff, can save and distill it again.
* Heart: Almost pure ethanol, this is what you drink.
* Tail: Ethanol with some bad tasting stuff, can save and distill it again.
There is a chemical check you can do to ensure there’s no methanol in your alcohol. Licensed commercial producers of alcohol do all of this and more, so you can trust that it won’t blind you. You can’t trust that some stranger making bathtub gin did all of this, so you may end up blind.
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