Please explain to me the fermentation process.
In: 3
Step 1, create a sugary beverage like grape juice.
Step 2, add yeast. The yeast eats the sugar and creates alcohol as a byproduct.
Step 3, bottle your newly alcoholic drink.
There are about 111 different yeasts used in various forms of fermentation.
Each yeast will consume carbs in the base material. As they do so, they produce two types of alcohol, ethyl and methyl.
Ethyl is what you find in professionally brewed products such as beer, wine and spirits. Methyl is the stuff that makes you blind.
Methyl becomes formic acid in your blood stream and that substance will attack your optic nerve. This kind of blindness is not repairable. You will not heal.
Most moonshiners know that when you distill alcohol, you throw away the first part of the batch. Methyl is a lightest of the alcohol chains and it will come out first. So, they either burn off the first part of a batch or toss in with some gasoline to run their lawn toys.
Figuring out when you have tossed enough of the batch is as much art as science. Experience counts, but knowing what you are doing is far more successful.
1) get some food (juice, milk, vegetables, meat, dough, etc)
2) If needed, modify the food to encourage only the microorganisms that you want (adding salt or acid or enzymes or drying or other)
3) If needed, heat the food to kill all existing microorganisms to start with a blank slate
4) add microorganisms such as yeast, bacteria, or fungus (attract them from the environment or add an isolated culture that you know is already correct)
5) Control temperature to keep microorganisms operating the way you wanted (could be as simple as storing in a cool, dark place up to a computer-controlled climate system)
6) wait for the process to complete
7) enjoy the product or put it into storage
Examples:
Milk, heated then cooled. Add some live culture yogurt. keep at room temp covered. Eventually you’ve got yogurt.
boiled and strained barley juice + hops. Cool and add yeast. Place in cool, dark place for several days. You’ve got flat beer. Place in bottles (with some sugar) or place in keg with CO2 tank to carbonate.
cooked shredded cabbage + salty water (at the right %salt) = sauerkraut
Yeast is a microorganism that eats sugar of any kind and poops out alcohols (ethanol and methanol). When you ferment something, you add yeast and sugar so the yeast gets to binge, then take a massive dump, and it keeps doing this until it literately suffocates in its own poop, and then some human drinks that dump down and calls it yummy because nature is gross.
Latest Answers