First off, I thought code tags would just make the text fixed-width. Sorry about the ugly in my other post.
Now, about fermentation time. I've noticed that rum ferments quickly. Even with a full 32 sugar cane in the barrel, rum only has detrimental effects if you drink it within the first MC-day or so. By the second MC-day of fermentation, you may only get poisoned occasionally, and only if you drink two mugs of rum. Beyond that, it's almost always OK to drink it.
And a note about the effects themselves:
Resistance and Fire Resistance are well known, but Blindness and Nausea are effects normally caused by potions that aren't active in the game code. This is probably because the effects themselves aren't terribly helpful when used against humans, and would actually require extra coding for AI enemies.
Blindness darkens the sky during the day. That's all. During night, you can still see the moon and stars (skybox). During day, the normally blue sky is pure black. You can still see everything around you, and you can see the sun (similar to being in void fog, except without the distance fog effect). It's incredibly crap for a "downer" effect. A human opponent you inflict this on will not be fazed at all. AI would need some sort of handicap coded in to make them stumble around from this, since it's not a stat nerf.
Nausea makes your screen "wave" or "twist" or "swirl". It's a rendering effect only. The aiming crosshair, at worst, swings around in a circle roughly just under the diameter of a block at 2 meters away. A well-oriented human opponent might be annoyed by it at best. At worst, they might have a rendering path patch that refuses to apply the effect (similar to the way X-ray works). And again, AI would have to have a handicap since there's no stat nerf.