How and why can homemade alcohol, like moonshine or rakija, make you go blind?
In: Biology
If it’s made correctly, it won’t. Distilled alcohol is made in two main phases: fermentation and distillation. Fermentation results in different types of alcohol all mixed together in some percentage, usually between 5 and 20 percent. At that point there is actually different types of alcohol in it. Ethanol, the (relatively) safe stuff is what you want, but there are other alcohols, usually referred to [‘higher alcohols or ‘fusel oils’] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusel_alcohol), which is the dangerous stuff.
When the distillation is done, the different alcohols boil out at different temperatures, so what needs to be done is that the ‘good’ alcohol (ethanol) is kept and the ‘bad’ (fusel oils) is discarded.
However, amateurs may or may not really know what they’re doing, and/or have the correct equipment to make sure what they produce has only ethanol in it. So, if there’s too much of the higher alcohols, then the result can be dangerous if you drink too much of it.
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