Beer doesn’t have a high enough alcohol volume level to be a disinfectant (recommended is 70+% ethanol, beer has 4-5%), just high enough so the fermenting process comes to a halt by inactivating the bacteria causing it.
Wouldn’t beer have less infection risk because of the alcohol? Disclaimer, I didn’t read any of the articles and have no expertise beyond drinking beer.
Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 week ago
As far as I know, some alcoholic drinks have certain alcohol levels because those levels are the lethal levels for the fermenting bacteria used.
But there are different alcohol levels in brewed drinks, so either it’s not true or bacteria have a range of lethal temperatures.
Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Nitpicking: the fermentation is done by a fungus, specifically a yeast strain. The fermentation process stops when you introduce oxygen, aka open the fermentation tank, or when the sugar in the wort is depleted. The yeast then just becomes inactive and you can potentially restart the fermentation at home by putting sugar in the beer and sealing it airtight. Most commercial beers remove the yeast through filtering or pasteurizing or both tho, so that would probably only work for craft beer. And it would make the result taste terrible I assume.
Some bacteria do not tolerate alcohol at all and will die from beer, but generally beer is not a disinfectant. Vodka isn’t either by the way, still too low levels of alcohol. But it works better than beer.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Oh I thought yeast was a bacteria, huh.