Alcohols (1) Fermentation

So here we are discussing alcohols yes that’s right alcohols not just alcohol (C₂H₅OH) the molecule that has for thousands of years brought both great joy and misery to thousands of people but the homologous series of organic molecules called alcohols.

Actually, though hardly anyone ever uses the term, they ought rather to be called alkanols since they are alkanes with one hydrogen (or more) substituted by an —O—H group. 

See if you can find anyone of significance using the term alkanol…….?

Let’s begin however with the most popular, in many ways, alcohol that is ethanol or ethyl alcohol and how its produced by fermentation:

Fermentation was known in the earliest times, at least 6000 years ago, because we can read that the biblical figure Noah after the biblical flood got drunk in his tent (you’ll find the story in the Bible book Genesis chapter 9 here.)

Fermentation is a natural process relying on an enzyme, zymase, found in yeast or grape skin in which the monosaccharide glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) is converted to ethanol and carbon dioxide at an optimum temperature of around 35-37^oC.

Today wine, beer and spirits production is a major industry world-wide accounting for millions of jobs and massive income in taxes for several Governments. 

So ethyl alcohol has its benefits with making us feel good about ourselves.

It also gives us Dutch courage to do, under its influence, stuff we’d regret or rather forget we did after we have sobered up!!

Many nations have imposed strict drink driving limits because of the effect ethyl alcohol has on our ability to act in a controlled way.

You might be interested to learn that a typical bottle of white wine, the one I’m looking at right now, contains 11.5% ethyl alcohol that's in a 750ml bottle. 

The total volume of pure alcohol in tis bottle of wine is 86.25ml.

A Unit of alcohol is defined as 10ml of pure alcohol so our bottle of wine contains 8.625 units of ethyl alcohol.

If it takes a healthy human liver around 1 hour to metabolise one unit of ethyl alcohol, then you are going to need about 9 hours to become sober after drinking this bottle. 

And then the time to get over your hangover!!!

You might want to familiarise yourself with the effects of excessive drinking and the kinds of conditions such behaviour eventually leads to.

You can get at that kind of information here.

In my next post, I’ll discuss some of the physical properties of alcohols and compare some of their properties with those of the alkanes.