Summer, sun, friends, water, swimming, breeze and, a Beer please!

After hours of surfing, some tease others about someone that fell off the board, others complain about a stolen wave... Until someone interrupts everyone with a "hey, look at this! Wicked!", as he shows his glass of beer, in which a peanut moves going up and down, non-stop as if it was running a relay race between the surface and the bottom (here, it is a local custom to drop a couple of peanuts into the beer, to lower the gasification and ease digestion... A tradition, nothing else). The amazed looks leave the water-sports anecdotes behind to now populate this small area of the beach with a sea made of homemade hypothesis.

As expected, we all wanted to be right. The daring Martin, stood up and went to show the phenomenon to some ladies that were in possession of some extremely attractive bodily attributes sitting next to us. He was a hit. Best ice breaker ever. Such a success he had that the ladies were also building their hypothesis, even experimenting; with a glass of water, under the shade, under the sun... Just like that, experimenting, out of nothing, some nice personal links were born. The best explanation was the one Martin had, he quoted Einstein, Heisenberg even Freud: He was really exploiting his "chat-up". I actually don't believe that his was the "best" explanation, yet... He had the best results with it.

Already back home, as I was digesting the predictable failure of all the "don't be a stranger", I researched a bit about the fundamentals of this strange phenomenon. It turns out that neither Martin or the nymphs of the table next to us were right.

The only one that was right was Archimedes

The Cretan said, as he had a nice beer with peanuts at the Cretan beach (if you never tried a Cretan beer, you'll die incomplete as human being): "Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object". Now, if you throw a peanut into water, it sinks; why doesn't it in beer? The density of both liquids is actually, pretty much the same, the buoyancy at both liquids is pretty much the same as consequence. The key is in the effervescent personality a beer has. If you look closely, you'll notice that the peanut is covered with small bubbles as it sinks in the beer. As any good bubble, they want to float; and in that process they drag the peanut towards the surface. The bubbles that contact the surface, join the air above and the few remaining at the peanut can no longer support the buoyancy... Sinking again, until new bubbles form at the peanut... Mesmerizing as a Lava Lamp, but ethylic.

Great, we got it. But, why do bubbles attach to the elephant's fetish seeds?

It turns out that there's a process called "nucleation", very similar to what one may have observed at that beach meetup I mentioned, but instead of bubbles, men, and instead of peanuts women; but with a lot of differences. The gas, to form bubbles, does not require a divine substrate of angelical smooth skin, all the contrary. For this dance stem that implies passing from being dissolved into the beer to form a bubble, the gas prefers irregular surfaces, imperfect. The inner side of a glass is way more smooth than the peanut. So, as soon as the peanut joins the dance floor, all that gas that with a lot of effort formed bubbles in the glass, now has this beautiful irregular surface available to congregate at. Lets say that, at the moment of making bubbles, the gas prefers to go dance with the ugliest one. But, where does this fluid wingman comes from?

Sometime ago humankind discovered that, if he left a liquid (like, a fruit juice) settling for a long while in a container, it would change color, odor and flavor; and, when drank: all the jokes would be great ones, and all the opposite gender people would look great. There, out of pure fate, the study of alcoholic fermentation (or ethanol fermentation, if you prefer), becoming one of the first chemical processes ever studied. Other chemical processes, like the ones implied at the manufacturing of soap, were discovered centuries later; fact that hints us that: humankind's desire for personal hygiene is way more modern than the desire for intoxication.

Today, thousands of years and hangovers later, we know that the fermenting process is performed by some critters called yeasts. They "eat" sugars off the liquid, producing ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. That is their digestion, or better said, their metabolism. There's where the gas comes from, an infection of the liquid with yeast

But... where does the yeast comes from?

In the manufacturing process of beer, generally speaking, commercial yeasts are used. Yet yeasts, as many other unicellular lifeforms, are everywhere. They hover in the air, float in water; even inside our bodies. In a little traditional brewery in the US, for example, the beard of a master brewer was used to infect the beer. It may not be the best tasting beer in the world, but, considering that you're drinking beard juice: What do you expect?

To close the article I propose a toast honoring the yeasts, Archimedes, imperfect surfaces covered in bubbles, Martins surrounded by perfect surfaces, and girls surrounded of imperfect Martins talking about bubbles as an Ice breaker.

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