People get into home brewing and they inevitably start asking questions about the possible adverse health effects. Home brewing is essentially chemistry at work. It’s only natural to think something you’re making and drinking could be harmful.
The bottom line here is that mead can’t make you go blind. The concern is that with your mead you’ll be brewing some methanol and it will of course make you go blind from the toxicity. This is only possible when you’re distilling something.
Although it’s impossible to go blind from your mead, where does this idea come from exactly and are there any other dangers in making mead?
What causes blindness in home brew
When people bring up going blind from drinking home brew, it’s likely that they are referring to drinking methanol from drinking moonshine. When people make moonshine by distilling, one of the byproducts is methanol. Typically this is separated when people make moonshine by discarding the first few ounces of the brew when it’s being bottled. The methanol comes out in the foreshots along with a few other byproducts because of their low boiling point.
From what I’ve gathered distilling alcohol may not be the biggest problem. Although methanol is one of the byproducts of distillation, it’s usually not that much to cause many problems. The problem becomes if people don’t know what they are doing while distilling and they don’t discard the foreshots. Another problem could be a situation where people get cheap methanol somehow and add it back in to increase the power of their brew.
When you’re in a place like we had in the United States with prohibition, it creates a situation where people are going to start making spirits for money. This can be a problem because it attracts amateurs getting into it for the wrong reasons who don’t know what they are doing. It also attracts unscrupulous people who will do shady things like add methanol to raise abv to get more money for less work.
When alcohol is illegal, people also get desperate to drink. Believe it or not, they’ll actually turn to methanol to drink if they have to. This is a tragic situation and is another good reason why we left prohibition in the past!
Is this even possible in mead making?
None of this is a problem if you’re making mead because any amounts of methanol in mead are trace amounts that are completely harmless and hard to detect even with precise equipment. There’s absolutely no worry of methanol at all from making your mead so don’t worry about it.
The source for the trace amounts of methanol in mead comes from pectin which is a component from fruit skin or pulp. There’s some wine that contains a small amount of methanol because of the pectin content of the grapes, but it’s still not a whole lot and is safe. Mead contains mostly honey as a fermentable and therefore contains even less methanol than a wine that is considered safe.
What other adverse effects are there in mead
There really aren’t any adverse effects from making mead that you should be worried about. Most of the ill effects you’ll have will be caused by drinking too much or having some kind of allergic reaction to an ingredient. These allergic reactions are pretty rare though and you’d likely already know you’re allergic to such things before drinking it.
When making your mead, it’s possible to have an infection in your brew caused by some kind of bacteria or wild yeast that exists in your brewing vessel. This is why it’s always stressed to sanitize everything when you’re making your mead.
That being said, even if your mead was infected by some kind of competing microbe against your added yeast, it’s likely completely harmless as the alcohol that is in your vessel will destroy any harmful effects.
You’ll also likely be able to see if there’s some infection brewing and throw it out before drinking it.
Bottom Line
There’s no way you can go blind from mead. Brew and drink your mead in confidence friends!