Charles Cagniard de la Tour

Then, in the mid-19th century, sort of the 1830s, late 1830s, two very important things happened.

In 1836, Charles Cagniard Latour concluded that yeast is actually a living organism, and it consumes sugar, and that it excretes ethanol or alcohol.

And in 1839, Theodor Schwann in Germany concluded or proved that warming yeast up kills it and immediately stops fermentation.

And Theodor is the guy that named the single-celled organism that had been making wine for thousands of years.

A little more than sixty years ago, the scientific world received with almost incredulous astonishment the announcement that beer yeast consists of small spherules which have the property of multiplying and are therefore a living and not a dead chemical substance, that they further appear to belong to the vegetable kingdom and to be in some manner intimately connected with the process of fermentation.

When Cagniard Latour communicated the above observations on yeast to the Paris Academy of Sciences on June 12, 1837, the whole scientific world was taken by storm.

So great was the novelty, boldness, and originality of the conception that these insignificant particles, hitherto reckoned as of little or no account, should be endowed with functions of such responsibility and importance as suggested by Latour.

At the time when Latour sowed the first seeds of this great gospel of fermentation, started curiously almost simultaneously across the Rhine by Schwann and Kützing, its greatest subsequent apostle and champion was but a schoolboy, exhibiting nothing more than a schoolboy's truant love of play and distaste for lessons.

A little more than sixty years ago, the scientific world received with almost incredulous astonishment the announcement that beer yeast consists of small spherules which have the property of multiplying, and are therefore a living and not a dead chemical substance, that they further appear to belong to the vegetable kingdom, and to be in some manner intimately connected with the process of fermentation.

When Cagniard Latour communicated the above observations on yeast to the Paris Academy of Sciences on June 12, 1837, the whole scientific world was taken by storm.

So great was the novelty, boldness, and originality of the conception that these insignificant particles, hitherto reckoned as of little or no account, should be endowed with functions of such responsibility and importance as suggested by Latour.

At the time when Latour sowed the first seeds of this great gospel of fermentation, started curiously almost simultaneously across the Rhine by Schwann and Kützing, its greatest subsequent apostle and champion was but a schoolboy, exhibiting nothing more than a schoolboy's truant love of play and distaste for lessons.