Lecture 14: Yeasts - Alcoholic Fermentation

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

1:23 PM
• Final Spore due noon Friday March 30
• Midterm 2 is Thursday April 12
• Extra Credit Movie - Monday March 26 7:30-8:30
o 233 Plant Science
• Moose can get drunk off fermented apples in the northern countries during the fall
o Not limited to just moose
• Beer is third most popular beverage in the world
o Water
o Tea
o Beer
• Why is beer so popular over the ages?
o Less likely to carry dangerous germs than water
• Cooking and fermentation process helps kill of bacteria
o Tasty when made right
o Many people rather enjoy the effects of alcohol
• Who invented beer
o Probably the sumerians
o It was the ancient egyptians who left good records of established brewing processes
• 3000 years ago
• Their beer wasn’t fizzy
• They didn’t use hops
§ New northern addition to beer
• Beer and America
o Washington, jefferson and adams were brewers
o National anthem steals tune from song about alcohol and sex
o Beer is a good money maker for capitalists
• Egypt's contribution to beer
o Cleopatra was the first to introduce beer tax
o Fermented barley cakes were used to make beer
• Bread making is similar to beer making
o Both start with starch and sugar and then use yeast to ferment that sweetness into alcohol
and co2
o Egyptians made bread then turned it into beer
• Yeast
o Don’t make hyphae, just make copies of itself
o Saccharomyces cerevisiae
o Phylum ascomycota
o It makes asci (water cannons that shoot spores)
• For yeast the acsi cant shoot spores the same way
• Asci contain 4 spores
o Yeast might be the most abundant fungus in the world
o Many different types of yeast
• Any fungus that can grow as a single budding cells gets called a yeast
• Yeasts are not all related
• Beer
o Four ingredients
• Water
 • Grain
• Hops
• Yeast
o Formation of beer led to cuneiform (first form of writing for egypt??)
o First beverage to be pasteurized
o Yeast
• When theres no oxygen, yeast can still have anaerobic respiration
§ Not very efficient though
• Can only charge up 2 ATPs
• By products are carbon dioxide and alcohol
• Fermentation is the conversion od sugars to alcohols and other procyst by
microbes
• Yeats likes the energy, it uses it to grow
• The carbon dioxide rises dough and fizzes beer
o Hops
• The female flowers of the hop plant are sticky and resinous (like marijuana)
• Gives beer a nice bitter taste
• Helps preserve the beer (antibacterial)
• Caught on in the 9th century
• Very tall windy plants
§ Let hops grow up wires, poles or stilts
§ The amount and variety of hops affects beer flavor
o Grain
• Most beer is made from barley base
• Harvest the barley
• Malt it
§ A process before drying and roasting
§ Malting is the process of inducing seeds to germinate
§ As seeds germinate they convert their own starches into sugar
§ Sugar is what we need to make beer
§ Once your seeds begin to germinate, roast them
§ Then the sweet, malted barley will make yeast
• How long you roast determines the darkness of beer
o Water
• The quality of water is important
o Make it
• Mix ingredients
• Boil it
• Chill it
• Add your yeast
• Let it ferment
• Bottle it
o End of process
• Bubbles = carbon dioxide
• Ethanol = usually under 10%
• Dead yeast = filtered out
• Respiration
o This process gives us energy as we break down glucose in the presence of oxygen
• That’s aerobic respiration
o From one glucose, you can charge up to 36 ATPs
• By products are carbon dioxide and water
 o Essential for almost all life forms on earth
• Alcohol as a drug
o In the US, alcohol kills 88,000 people a year
• 2013, 31% driving deaths
o Alcohol misuse cause up to 100 billion a year
• Taxes don’t really help with these costs
o Rule of thumb: you can process one drink an hour
• 6-12 oz beer, 5oz wine or 1 oz hard alcohol
o Cornell health recommends
• The way to drink for optimal high to to reach your buzz slowly and maintain it
• Beer vs Wine
o The same yeast
o Use sterile ingredients for beer
o Sugar for beer comes from malt
o Sugar for wine comes from grapes
o Hops are added to beer
o Nothing else is added to wine
• Liquor
o Is made by distilling from weaker stuff
o Start with something like beer and distill it to remove excess water
• We can use alcohol as fuel for car and busses
o Fed requirement to add ethanol to gas
o Often made from corn
• This could raise the prices for our food
o Instead of malted seeds, could we use a different source: cellulose
• Cellulose
§ Cellulose is often the waste by products of organic materials
§ High push for cellulosic ethanol
§ Cellulose needs to be broken down into sugar first though before yeast can
ferment it
• FUNGI is really good at breaking down cellulose
• Issues with biofuels
o Can result in lower emissions, but environment impact from the growing and processing
of biofuel crops can negate the positive impacts
• Impact on land and food costs
• ALL ethanol is made by yeast
• Henry ford
o Had the idea of using ethanol as a way to fuel cars
o Back in that time there was a powerful petroleum lobby which is why we've been using
petroleum
• Alcohol burns more cleanly than oil
• eth