How can fermentation break glass if there’s no increase in matter in the bottle?

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I’m thinking of like when you bottle wine that’s still fermenting, and it explodes. I understand that the fermentation process raises the air pressure inside the bottle. What I *don’t* understand is how? When you pump air into a balloon, the air pressure rises because there are *more* air molecules entering the balloon.

With wine in a bottle, you have a fixed amount of matter at a certain temperature. I don’t understand how fermentation could increase air pressure in a closed system?

In: Physics

21 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

ELI5: fill a glass bottle with water and close. Doesn’t break, doesn’t explode. Now freeze it. It will break. Same amount of water molecules, same mass, if you put it on a scale you’ll see it weights the same, but the water changed structure and takes more volume. Similar thing with fermentation. The stuff inside goes through some chemical reactions and some matter becomes a gas that takes more volume than before. And the glass is not strong enough to resist.

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