LogFAQs > #954702308

SunWuKung420 posted...

Nothing substantial in that closed environment and lack of proper oxygenation.

Well yeah, that's a given. Suffocating any yeast will kill it before it can produce a decent amount of alcohol. You didn't say "you can't make an alcoholic beverage with bread yeast in an airtight container," though, you said "you can't make an alcoholic beverage with bread yeast," which is just plain wrong.

shadowsword87 posted...

Soooooo what you're saying is.... squeeze bread dough and drink the liquids that come out to get drunk

Not so much. Bread generally doesn't have enough readily-available sugars to allow a significant amount of alcohol to be produced, nor is enough yeast used. Given enough fermentation time, you might get something, but that's going to be much, much longer than bread dough would normally ferment for, and the dough will probably go bad before you get anything meaningful. There is alcohol produced by fermenting the bread, but it boils off during baking (ethanol boils at 78C, 22 degrees below water's BP and way below all bread-baking temperatures).

That said, you can produce a fermented beverage surprisingly easily. The most common theory for how people first started making alcoholic beverages is that some stored grain (which would have been eaten primarily by mixing it with water to create a porridge; bread came later) got wet and started fermenting because that was enough to make wild yeasts happy with it. Those wouldn't have been particularly strong alcoholic beverages, nor would I expect them to taste very good, but replicating that accident was enough to make something that was safer to drink than most water supplies. The process was then refined from there to produce more enjoyable stuff, though again, deliberately using specific yeasts has been a thing for less than 200 years.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.