How can moonshine cause blindness?
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Yes. Fermentation produces two distinct types of alcohol. The first is ethyl alcohol aka ethanol. This is the kind you want to drink and enjoy. The other kind methyl alcohol aka methanol. When you distill the fermented mash like you do with moonshine you concentrate those alcohols. Luckily methanol is ends up passing through the still before the ethanol. Proffesional distillers call the first products from the still the “heads” even before we knew what methanol was, we knew to throw away the heads. They were dangerous. After that you get “the hearts” this is the good stuff, the ethanol. You want to keep the hearts. Finally you have “the tails” this is the last little bit of the ethanol then a bunch of other gross by-products from the fermentation. It isn’t inherently dangerous to drink the tails but it tastes disgusting.
So you have 3 products from a single run of your still. No one wants to drink the tails so that is just garbage. If you don’t make a distinction between the heads and hearts of the distillate you could accidentally have a dangerous amount of methanol in your moonshine. Only 10ml of methanol will permanently blind someone. That’s 2 of those tiny teaspoons for those more familiar. So an inexperienced moonshiner or one just trying to squeeze as much profit from a single run of moonshine can unintentionally cut off the heads when there still methanol being processed through.
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