Alcoholic fermentation is an old art. Beer was produced through fermentation in ancient Egypt. The word fermentation comes from the latin fermentare that means to boil. This is precisely due to the appearance of boiling by CO2 bubbling during the fermentation process.
Alcoholic beverages have been produced in almost every corner of the World by different cultures and from various types of raw materials. There were so many beverages recipes that people used to keep them secret. This lead to the fact that for a long time fermentation was more an art than a science. This way fermentation secrets were known to a few artists. This is the reason that W. M. Ingledew refers to it as the black box in ethanol production.
Even in our days, there is much to learn regarding alcoholic fermentation phenomena. But one thing can be said we certainty: fermentation is the heart of the alcohol plant. Notwithstanding, there are some alcohol producers that don’t believe it. Many plants often treat there fermentation facilities as a real Cinderella. They don’t invest enough. There are plants where fermentation is not anything more than a section of dirty vessels…
Our experience and our ethanol production approach is precisely good fermentation. Expertise and knowledge about this biological phenomenon is a must. Someone said that you cannot manage what you don’t measure. Nothing is truer than this in fermentation. This is where you first put your raw materials. If you don’t perform well in fermentation nothing can the distillation do to fix the problems. Here yeasts make the hard work converting sugars into alcohol.
Since this is a biological process it has to be managed and measured carefully. You need to know how well sugars are yielding alcohol. How can you do this the right way if you don’t account for raw material and give yeast the best environment to do its job? In many plants this doesn’t seem to be really important. This mistake can cost significant amounts of money.
It is important to note that even when raw materials for alcohol production can be diverse, fermentation principles remain the same: conversion of sugar into alcohol by yeast. What you need in some cases where glucose is not directly available as in the case of cellulose and starch, is previous treatment of this materials to break down big molecules into simple glucose by enzymatic or heat processes.
