Stored corn silage often oozes liquid that collects at the base of the silo. The cats that drink this silo liquid become sick and woozy. Why is that? And what exactly is that liquid?
You could think of that as a moonshine precursor. Fermented corn mash run through a still to pull off as pure as possible ethanol fraction results in corn liquor. Potent stuff. Undistilled, it's pretty bad for you; distilled, it may be worse.
It is called silage effluent and contains fermentation products of the corn. The fermentation doesn't occur using the yeast that we normally think of, but rather a mix of naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria. The effluent also has a high amount of nitric acid in it. Either of these--bacterial fermentation products and nitric acid could make the animals sick upon ingestion of it
