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slim chillingsworth

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I am working on an art piece and I'm trying to find the most succinct way of visually conveying beer fermentation through a chemical formula.

Is there a way of doing this, or would any formula just generally refer to fermentation? If I use the formula for maltose does that clarify it?

For example, if I had this image:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Maltose2.svg

and then some sort of arrow pointing to an image of ethanol's molecular formula, would that makes sense from a chemistry point of view? do i need to include byproducts like co2 to make sense of it?

input appreciated...
 
I'm not what one would strictly refer to as a chemist, but I did get a little chemistry as part of my military training. For what you are trying to do, you need to put all of your reactants on one side (sugar and yeast, though I am not sure how to include a biological process in a chemical formula) and all the products on the other side (alcohol and CO2). If I had a take a stab at it, I'd do it like this:

picture.php


Hope that gets you at least pointed in the right direction. Cheers.
 
Maltose is first broken down into it's component glucose molecules (maltose is a disaccharide composed of two, chemically bound glucose molecules; glucose is a monosaccharide). Once the yeast break down maltose into glucose, the standard fermentation reactions (glucose --> ethanol + CO2) takes place. Don't forget too that the yeast end up with some ATP (stored, cellular energy) - this is why fermentation exists, we just take advantage of the by products!
 
You could just use this pathway

This is what I would suggest. You can draw out all the molecules too, and make them super pretty with yellow dots for carbon, blue dots for oxygen, tiny red dots for hydrogen, etc etc.
 
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