Alcohol Without Yeast

I was just pondering the idea of yeast and how we could make alcohol without it.. and thought about Synthetic Alcohol. That article seems to be the start of something that could phase out alcohol in the next century, but for now I'm curious if there is ANY known way to make alcohol without the use of yeast

I'm no chemist by any means. But in order to do that you might have to find a way to isolate some lactobacillus and put that in.

The synthetic "alcohol" described in the article does not contain any alcohol at all. It is meerly a mix of mindaltering drugs that make you feel "buzzed".

Gregscsu said:

The synthetic "alcohol" described in the article does not contain any alcohol at all. It is meerly a mix of mindaltering drugs that make you feel "buzzed".

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Yeah, I understand that. I'm simply saying it could replace alcohol.

I'm curious if there is another way to make Alcohol. I found a couple articles that suggest it is. It sounds like you need to extract the enzyme that produces alcohol from the yeast cells and introduce that to sugars.

I was just thinking hard about how alcohol is made and was curious if that was the ONLY way it is made. Hydration of ethylene produces non-drikable alcohol, but not really interested in that. I think drinkable alcohol is pretty much only made with yeast.

Synthetic alcohol sounds pretty cool though. It would be cool to have an antidote to alcohol

I read somwhere that they use bacteria to make alchohol out of wood pulp
Cant find it now tho...

but this might be interesting http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/bdigest/2011/01/10/celanese-patents-acetic-acid-to-ethanol-conversion-process/

diazepam enhances drunkenness, there is no way it could ever replace it. unless it can **** in my sock drawer.

cool brew said:

Yeah, I understand that. I'm simply saying it could replace alcohol.

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What would be the advantage?

That article is a joke. benzodiazepines are highly addictive. This "synthetic" alcohol from benzodiazepine-spiked liquid will never be allowed to be served, so dont get your hopes up that it will phase out alcohol!

isnt that the same thing at ludes or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methaqualone

Alcohol is produced by countless micro-organisms. There are plenty of fungi and bacteria that produce alcohol. Go into google and type fungal ethanol production and then try bacterial ethanol production. If you want to find better quality results type filetypedf after your search and it will increase the percentage of scientific journal articles found, I would rate myself as highly educated in most areas of science simply because of my use of filetypedf.

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=fungal+ethanol+production+filetypedf&oq=fungal+ethanol+production+filetypedf&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=hp.3...7830l10552l3l10733l6l6l0l0l0l0l80l418l6l6l0.frgbld.&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=fd7db91cb597af7&biw=720&bih=783

AFAIK, all ethanol production is via yeast or other fermentation microorganisms. Most of these use some sort of sugar as a substrate, but as janivar mentioned, efforts to generate ethanol from cellulose has recently been demonstrated.

In terms of other options, you could generate it using purified enzymes, but it would be difficult - you'd need about 1 dozen separate enzymes, electron carriers like NADP, energy source (ATP) and a range of substrates (ADP, phosphate, etc).

Synthetic ethanol is also made, largely for industrial uses, via the addition of water to ethane. According to wikipedia, only one company still does this; fermentable sugars being readily available and cheap these days.

Bryan

oldstyle69 said:

isnt that the same thing at ludes or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methaqualone

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barbiturates are different than benzodiazepines, tho similar. different binding site and effects on their target receptor, althugh the target receptor is the same. also, barbiturates are even more addictive than benzodiazepines.

that article = fail

If you're going to go as far as that article suggests to get buzzed, just go smoke some weed or something

So, i think i just made alcohol without yeast. I put a small amount of "milo's sweet tea" in a bottle and watered it down to look like pee. Originally it was for a drug test, but i left it somewhere and forgot about it for like a month, anyways, i found it this morning and it was all bubbly and had a brown sludge in the bottom and i opened it and it sounded like i was opening a soda and it kind of smelled like a beer. sorry about that last run-on, if there are any grammar nazis here). anyways i poured it out because i didnt know if it would be safe to drink. Is there any way to tell if it is? because i can definatley make another one.

Sounds like you used wild yeast. It's everywhere. Including growing in my beard.

Besides yeast, the main player in ethanol production is Zymomonas mobilis.
Already 20 years ago their ethanologenic pathway was sucessfully introduced into E. coli [Ohta et al., Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 57(4):893–900, 4 1991.]. The problem with that, is mainly that E. coli is by far more susceptible to the toxic effect of the produced ethanol.