How can moonshine cause blindness?

Question

How can moonshine cause blindness?

In: 23

Answer 1

Concentrating a beer into a liquor is a form of refining.

Refining, in this usage, is slowly raising the temperature of a mixture, causing “different fractions” of the source mixture so that the different components boil off one at a time.

Boiling is a weird piece of science. Like water boils at one temperature, and various alcohols boil at different temperatures, but a mixture of alcohol (ethanol) and water boils at a temperature in the middle dependent on the percentage of each.

Then there are things that boil at their own temperature regardless of what they are mixed with.

One of the side effects of all this is that you have to “batch”. If you try to make a (continuous) factory every time you add new stuff your get want you don’t want from the new mix.

So you have to make it as distinct batches.

First you have to make a beer or wine. You make some stuff up, heat sterilize it, add yeast, and add a one-way cable to keep the oxygen out. The yeast rates the sugars and starches to make alcohol. Alcohol kills yeast. So getting more than about 7% is basically impossible.

So you make this beer.

Then you pour it into as big a vat as you can and set it on the heat.

The first things that boil off are the “volatile esters”. They are nasty, potent, sometimes toxic. You just let that shit go. But you want some left behind for flavor.

Then you attach a condenser. A chilled tube. The stuff that boils into vapor is turned back into a liquid in the tube.

The earliest product is the best product in refining. (When do it to crude oil the first products are things like acetone and the last dregs are things like Vaseline).

So the last esters and the fists alcohols to Boil are super toxic.

But right behind that is the strongest alcohol and biggest flavor.

So all distilleries want to throw away enough, but all little as possible. A commercial distillery can test and time to a hair’s breath.

Some guy in his barn not so much. And they suggest pain at riding or a bottle or there is product they need money from.

So it’s tempting to make Larger batches and let a little of the potent poison product into the mix.

Another problem is that real conference are expensive. So things like old radiators get used instead. That can leach metals and dissolved cruft into the product as well.

These are the things that regulations address in a business that just blow by in unregulated moonshine.