How does beer become alcoholic in the production process?
In: 16
Yeast. They are the best little workers. Hire a few and they will grow a legion of little workers that work for sugar. If you start with basically any room temperature sugar solution and add yeast, the yeast will start eating sugars. Yeast are facultative anaerobes -, they can live in solutions that contain oxygen and in solutions that have no oxygen. In aerobic solutions they generate almost all CO2 and very little alcohol. In an anerobic (no oxygen) solution, they have a neat metabolic trick – they can break down sugar into ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and CO2 in basically a 1:1 ratio. If there is plenty of food available, yeast can enter an exponential growth phase and will consume sugar very quickly. As the food dwindles and the ethanol.concentration increases, this stresses the yeast and the fermentation rate slows. Eventually, the alcohol concentration becomes toxic and yeast die or make less useful compounds (glycerol, acetic acid, lactic acid).
Some beer doesn’t even add yeast – Saisons or farmhouse ales are commonly made with wild yeast – ie, whatever blows into the fermenter.
Latest Answers