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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Same as why people thought stuff that went up would then go down even though we hadn’t discovered gravity yet.
Stuff just did other stuff nd people didn’t look into it any further.
They just knew that brew begat brew, or they figured it was magic.
The Norse had a tradition where they would take a piece of wood and inoculate it with the yeast- sometimes a stick they would stir the brew with, sometimes an unworked log they would simply dump in it wholesale. The porous wood would take in living yeast from the brew, dry it safely, and store it for when it was dunked into the next brew.
They didn’t know anything about germs or yeast, they just knew the wood helped the brew.
A lot of medieval European cultures used beer wort to leaven bread. It’s easy enough to imagine this originating with someone doing this by accident trying to make a simple flatbread, substituting water for whatever leftover beer they had in the bottom of their pot.
Things can often simply ferment naturally. A fruit laying on the forest floor or a bees nest washed by the rain into a hollow stump have a decent, although not great, chance of being colonized primarily by yeast before anything else. If someone was desperate enough to eat or drink those things, they might put together that letting sweet things sit for long enough sometimes made you feel nice when you consumed them instead of making you sick.
That shit just happened and it was cool as fuck. Berries ferment naturally and people figured that out probably by eating them, and started to replicate those conditions and perfect them over time. They began to see what variables changed the flavor and potency and the like. Relatively quickly the enjoyment of somewhat simple to produce very flavorful beverage spread and so more people started to have more ideas about how and what to do. The fact that it’s fermentation is a new idea and cool but doesn’t actually do much to the process overall
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