What Is Fermentation?
Fermentation is a chemical change brought on by the action of microscopic yeast, molds and bacteria. The souring of milk, the rising of dough and the conversion of sugar to alcohol are all examples of fermentation. Of course the conversion of sugar to alcohol is what we are interested in so that is what we will be concentrating on. Alcohol is produced when yeast enzymes break up sugar into roughly equal parts of alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. Everyone may be familiar with bakers yeast but most yeast occur wild in nature and grow on plants and animals where they are dispersed through the air and water. Yeast spores are everywhere and if they get a chance they will gladly ferment your grape juice or malt. The problem with this is that there are thousands of strains of wild yeast and most of them are not suitable for fermenting alcohol. Most wild yeast will give your beer or wine strange off-tastes and a lot of them are not very tolerable of alcohol which means you will end up with a par
In a general sense, fermentation is the conversion of a carbohydrate such as sugar into an acid or an alcohol. More specifically, fermentation can refer to the use of yeast to change sugar into alcohol or the use of bacteria to create lactic acid in certain foods. Fermentation occurs naturally in many different foods given the right conditions, and humans have intentionally made use of it for many thousands of years. The earliest uses of fermentation were most likely to create alcoholic beverages such as mead, wine, and beer. These beverages may have been created as far back as 7,000 BCE in parts of the Middle East. The fermentation of foods such as milk and various vegetables probably happened sometime a few thousand years later, in both the Middle East and China. While the general principle of fermentation is the same across all of these drinks and foods, the precise methods of achieving it, and the end results, differ. Beer is made by taking a grain, such as barley, wheat, or rye, g
Fermentation has always been an important part of our lives: foods can be spoiled by microbial fermentations, foods can be made by microbial fermentations, and muscle cells use fermentation to provide us with quick responses. Fermentation could be called the staff of life because it gives us the basic food, bread. But how fermentation actually works was not understood until the work of Louis Pasteur in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the research which followed. Fermentation is the process that produces alcoholic beverages or acidic dairy products. For a cell, fermentation is a way of getting energy without using oxygen. In general, fermentation involves the breaking down of complex organic substances into simpler ones. The microbial or animal cell obtains energy through glycolysis, splitting a sugar molecule and removing electrons from the molecule. The electrons are then passed to an organic molecule such as pyruvic acid. This results in the formation of a waste product
