Why does fermenting sugar create alcohol, but fermenting cabbage doesn’t?
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There are different types of microbes which can be used in fermentation and they produce various different things when fermenting food. When brewing beer or other alcoholic beverages we use a yeast which produce alcohol from the sugar. You have to be vary careful during the brewing process not to get the wort contaminated with other microbes after it have been boiled as this will spoil the beer.
When fermenting cabbage we use a type of bacteria which produce lactic acid during the fermentation process. These bacteria thrive well on vegetables like cabbage. But you still want to optimise the conditions for them so they can kill off any any other types of microbes. For example if you get the temperature a bit high then the same type of yeast you can find in beer and wine might thrive instead and you do get alcoholic cabbage.
In addition to brewers yeast and lactic acid bacteria there are tons of other types of microbes which produce various other results when fermenting. Fortunately most toxic ones produce something that looks, smells and taste bad to humans.
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