FERMENTATION

 Who the heck invented wine?!?  It’s been around for so long, and enjoyed by so many humans around the world, we surely should have a historical reference as to the genius that brought it to our attention.  The fact is, it could very well have been a pig, a monkey, or perhaps even a dinosaur that first discovered a crude version of the stuff. If a fruit or berry of some sort lays under the sun long enough, the sugars inside will be ingested by the yeast cultures and excreted as alcohol.  That’s wine!

Of course, the human advances in technology over the past five thousand years have surely helped to create a much more refined fermented beverage than the one some animal might have luckily stumbled upon originally, but the fundamental process is still very much the same: yeasts collecting the sugars of a fruit and converting them to alcohol, with carbon dioxide (CO2) also being released.  In the case of beer (NOW we got your attention!), this process occurs on a grain or blend of grains, and the CO2 is trapped inside to create a bubbly beverage.