How and why can homemade alcohol, like moonshine or rakija, make you go blind?
In: Biology
A by-product of fermentation is methanol. It vaporizes at lower temp than ethanol. So when you distill your mash to get alcohol you start distilling methanol first, then distill ethanol (the alcohol you want).
Sometimes moonshiners don’t know about this and keep the entire distillation run. So the first few jugs they fill with “booze” are high in methanol. One of the long term effects of methanol poisoning (if you survive the short-term) is blindness.
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