eli5: Why does apple juice expire if you leave it for a month but when you turn it into Alcohol it is okay to drink it even if it aged for months?
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To just simplify what others have said:
Let apple juice spoil: let all the “bad” germs in and around the juice have a shot at colonizing the juice. Drink it, you drink the “bad” germs.
Turn apple juice into alcohol: Turn into alcohol by killing all the “bad” germs that are currently in the juice, and then convert the sugars in the juice into something that’ll keep the “bad” germs out in the future (alcohol).
As a historic perspective, we took the first process, and slowly discovered what we could do to increase the odds that the process would result in clean alcohol. Learned how to kill the “bad” germs. Learned how to keep the “good” germs (yeast) that do the converting for us. etc, etc.
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