Industrial Fermentation: Principles, Processes, and Products
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EVOLUTION OF MODERN FERMENTATION PROCESSES
have been made from fermented beans. For centuries, the Balkan people have enjoyed ferHumans were well aware of fermentations, mented milk, or yogurt, and members of even though they had little knowledge of what Central Asian tribes have found equal pleascaused them, long before they were able to ure in sour camel's milk, or kumiss. Bread, record such an awareness. Sometime in pre- which has been known almost as long as agrirecorded history, people discovered that meat culture itself, involves a yeast fermentation allowed to stand a few days was more pleas- process. Loaves of bread have been found in ing to the taste than meat eaten soon after the Egyptian pyramids built 6000 years ago. The discovery of fruit fermentation was kill. They also were aware that intoxicating made so long ago that the ancient Greeks drinks could be made from grains and fruits. believed wine had been invented by the god The aging of meat and the manufacture of Dionysus. The manufacture of beer is only alcoholic beverages were human's first uses slightly less ancient that that of wine. A of fermentation. Without even knowing that microorganisms Mesopotamian clay tablet written in Sumerianexisted, ancient people learned to put them to Akkadian about 500 years before Christ tells work. The ancient art of cheese-making us that brewing was a well-established profesinvolves fermentation of milk. For thousands sion 1500 years earlier. An Assyrian tablet of of years, the soy sauces of China and Japan 2000 B.c. lists beer among the commodities that Noah took aboard his ark. Egyptian documents dating back to the Fourth Dynasty, about *E-P Therapeutics, Inc. 2500 B.c., describe the malting of barley and **Pfizer Inc. the fermentation of beer. Kui, a Chinese rice ***Emeritus Professor & Provost, Lehigh University. beer, has been traced to 2300 B.c. 963
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Riegel Handbook of Industrial Chemistry, I Oth Edition
Edited by Kent. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York 2003
964
RIEGEL'S HANDBOOK OF INDUSTRIAL CHEMISTRY
During the Middle Ages, experimenters learned how to improve the taste of wine, bread, beer, and cheese. Yet, after thousands of years of experience people still did not realize that in fermentations they were dealing with microorganisms. It was not until 1857 that Pasteur proved alcoholic fermentation was brought about by yeasts, and that yeasts were living cells. The discovery marked a turning point in medical history and the birth of microbiology. The inheritors of Pasteur's knowledge sought to use microbes as production workers in industry. The production ofbakers' yeast in deep, aerated tanks was developed toward the end of the nineteenth century. During World War I, Chaim Weizmann used a bacterial cousin of the gas gangrene microbe to convert maize mash into acetone, which was essential in the manufacture of the explosive cordite. In 1923, Pfizer opened the world's first successfull plant for citric acid fermentation. The process involved a fermentation utilizing the mold Aspergill
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