Ideas That Changed The Rum World
Category: Microbiology, Fermentation
Fermentation has, from its early days, relied on the action of microorganisms on fermentable sugars to produce alcoholic beverages that people want to consume. And just as long as societies have been consuming them, beverage business owners and operators have been fighting a war to keep undesirable fermenting or polluting organisms away from the desirable ones.
Idea: Pasteurization
Pasteurization is a process aimed at killing bacteria and yeast in order to preserve foods/beverages or to prepare them for the subsequent introduction of new organisms, such that they will not encounter competition from early organisms. The process is named after Louis Pasteur, a French scientist who -in 1864- documented that beer and wine could be kept from spoiling by heating them. The concept of heating wine to keep it from spoiling, however, had been known in China since 1117 and in Japan since at least 1478.
Louis Pasteur is recognized as one of the fathers of microbiology, especially for his work disproving the notion of spontaneous generation, which stated that living organisms could arise from inanimate matter, in the absence of similar organisms (in other words, they could generate spontaneously without having been pro-created by other members of the same species).
Pasteur’s work is not without controversy, since there were other contemporary scientists working on fermentation research as well, but his role and approach resulted in an enduring legacy, which is still felt in modern wineries, breweries and distilleries.