J. Barleycorn at War

U.S. guns consume half a pint of alcohol in every pound of powder. This year the U.S. needs an estimated 300,000,000 gallons of industrial ethyl alcohol-300% of its normal supply.

"The starting point for a new industry in a time when the shortage of alcohol is acute" was announced last week by Fordham's Frederick F. Nord before the American Chemical Society. Nord's starting point: his discovery that pentose, a sugar which is plentiful in corn and wood but has hitherto resisted fermentation by yeast enzymes, can be attacked and broken down by other enzymes secreted by certain fungi grown on mineral foodstuffs. The fungi reduce pentose to a heavy syrup (pyruvic acid) easily converted to ethyl alcohol.

Further promises of increased alcohol production revealed before the chemists last week:

> A 12% increase in the alcohol yield of grains can be had by using bread molds instead of the conventional malt* to convert starches to sugars, which are then fermented by yeasts. So reported Leland A. Underkofler, Ellis I. Fulmer and Lu Cheng Hao of Iowa State College, who point out that molds instead of malt were used long ago in the unscientific Orient. Grown on wheat bran, the molds are prepared in one-fifth the time required for malt. Their action yields 93 to 96% of the alcohol theoretically obtainable from corn, whereas malt yields only about 85%. Thus "the alcohol yield per bushel of corn was about 2.8 gallons with the mold-bran compared to 2.5 gallons with malt." Mold-fermentation of 100,000,000 bushels of corn or wheat would give about 25,000,000 more gallons of alcohol.

> Fermentation of both molasses and grains can be speeded up 1,000%, announced four scientists of the Seagram distilleries of Louisville, Ky. Molasses is now fermented in batches in 50 hours, but the Seagram chemists have devised a continuous five-hour cycle in which fresh molasses enters a single fermentation vessel while fermented material is constantly withdrawn at the other end. But pilot-plant operations must be studied before this laboratory technique is adopted by distilleries.

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