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

Sugar is densely packed. Carbon Dioxide is not. The fermentation is basically the yeast unpacking the dense sugar into “loose” carbon dioxide which bounces around causing the pressure to rise.

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