If the germ theory is relatively new, how do they think fermentation was happening (like wine, ale, yogurt etc.) thousands of years ago?
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Extra credits channel on yt just did a series on history of beer and touches on that [subject](https://youtu.be/KJsWaJVtZWA). Like all things food related discoveries: coincidence and it didn’t kill them.
How exactly is a rainbow made? How exactly does a sun set? How exactly does a posi-trac rear end on a Plymouth work? It just does.
The same way we know how to get into space via a rocket ship despite not knowing all there is to know about all related areas of physics.
It just works. Figuring out all the nitty-gritty stuff later doesn’t stop people from doing it to begin with, although you probably want a bigger knowledge base for something like sending shuttles into space.
Basically, while the nature of microbes (germs) and their composition, size, etc. were unknown, ancient people were pretty good about understanding their effects.
For example, several ancient religions/cultures forbid handling of dead bodies and eating pork; the ancient people wouldn’t have known about dangerous bacteria in rotting flesh or transmissible parasites in pigs, but they probably noticed a lot of people get sick/die after handling dead bodies of eating bad pork.
The Mongols believed that boiling water would drive our evil spirits and make it safe; replace ‘evil spirits’ with ‘disease causing pathogens’ and it’s pretty solid.
So, while ancient people didn’t know the chemical composition or processes of brewery yeast or alcohol, they knew water + sugar source + bread stuff = fire water. These ingredients would’ve been pretty close together, and alcohol even forms naturally on occasion. The fact that alcoholic drinks wouldn’t cause people to get the runs incentivized them to make it
Where do you think the water into wine “miracle” came from?
They thought things like this happened by a process called spontaneous generation. It’s exactly like it sounds. People believed that living things could spontaneously spring forth from matter without any sort of lineage. Basically, if they couldn’t see where it came from with their own eyes, it didn’t exist before then.
There are a few different ways that fermentation could have happened without the knowledge of germ theory. One way is that fermentation is a naturally occurring process, so it is possible that it just happened without anyone knowing why. Another possibility is that people knew that fermentation happened, but they did not know the reason why it happened. It is also possible that people had a general idea that fermentation happened because of microorganisms, but they did not know exactly how it worked.
Adding to the general theme that you can just observe these things without knowing the cause: people were also figuring this stuff out over thousands and thousands of years. Developing recipes and processes of making food took literal generations of trial and error. We have all this science now for brewing and baking, but we basically just reverse engineered it from what early humans figured out completely through experimentation on a massive timeline.
Like it used to baffle me that we ever figured out *bread* knowing all the steps it required. And then I realized that (a) the first “bread” was probably real shit, and (b) that there was honestly enough time for it to just happen on accident like the monkeys with the typewriters.
As others have said, yeast is everywhere and fermentation could be spontaneous. However, people have been keeping yeast for a long time even before they knew it was yeast or that they were keeping it.
One great example is the “yeast ring” or “yeast logs”. The basic concept is that wood has a lot of surface area, so pieces of wood would be placed in with a fermenting beverage.
By retrieving the wood from the batch, letting it dry, and using the same wood again next time, they were preserving a colony of yeast from batch to batch.
Did they know what yeast was? Not really, but they knew that reusing the same wood over and over made their fermentation work a lot better than leaving it to chance.
Just because germ theory is new doesn’t mean that germs are. People just had stuff happen. They decided they liked it, and recreated it. When that worked again, they kept it up and told others.
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