How and why can homemade alcohol, like moonshine or rakija, make you go blind?
In: Biology
When yeast ferments sugars it mostly produces ethanol, which is what makes you drunk and is (mostly) safe for human consumption. However there are a lot of other things that can potentially be made as well, and with distilled liquors the big problem you run into is methanol, which is toxic and can make you go blind. When you distil a liquid you heat it up and use the differences in boiling point of the different liquids to separate them. Methanol has a lower boiling point than ethanol or water, so when you start distilling your homemade liquor the very first thing that will come out of the still is fairly concentrated methanol. Which is bad.
Experienced and professional alcohol distillers know to discard the first output, but inexperienced home brewers might not know, and accidentally drink or sell straight poison.
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