ABOUT FERMENTATION AND FERMENTED LIQUOR.
Alcohol.—Alcohol may be obtained from any substance which contains sugar or starch, or both sugar and starch, as apples, pears, grapes, potatoes, beets, rice, barley, maple, honey, etc.
Alcohol can be obtained only by fermentation. By fermentation we mean the change which takes place when a juice containing sugar decays, or goes to pieces. You know decay always makes things fall to pieces.
You ask, what pieces is sugar made of? Very, very little pieces, called atoms. There are different kinds of sugar. In that made from grapes, called grape sugar, there are six atoms of carbon, twelve of hydrogen, and six of oxygen. What are carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen? Oxygen is the kind of gas which keeps animals alive, and makes things burn. Hydrogen is another kind, which you have smelled perhaps when water has been spilled on a hot stove; the gas burned in street-lamps is hydrogen that has been driven out of coal. Carbon you see in charcoal and soot; the black lead of your lead-pencils is mostly composed of carbon and iron; lamp-black is pure carbon, without form or shape.
We will let these circles of colored paper stand for the atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in grape sugar,—the largest, which are red, for the oxygen; the second size, which you notice are black, will represent atoms of carbon; while the little blue ones will make you think of hydrogen.
If you remember that it takes one atom of carbon and two of oxygen to make carbonic acid gas; also, that two atoms of carbon, one of oxygen, and six of hydrogen to form alcohol, you can easily find that two atoms of carbonic acid gas and two atoms of alcohol may be formed from an atom of sugar. So the more sugar a juice contains the more alcohol may be formed from it.
Cider.—Cider is made by pressing the juice out of apples. This sweet cider ferments, and the sugar part of it changes into carbonic acid gas and alcohol. People who do not understand this go on drinking cider, not knowing that it makes drunkards of those who drink much of a beverage which seems so pleasant and harmless.