History of pasteurization
Here’s a question. Who invented pasteurized milk? If you say Louis Pasteur, you’re only half right. Pasteur invented the process that carried his name but he had no interest in milk. All he cared about was beer. In 1856 Leo France is a beer town and there’s big trouble brewing. Beer keeps going bad and no one knows why. Louis Pasteur is a chemistry professor in Leo and he studies fermentation, a hot topic at that time. Scientists aren’t sure how sugar turns into alcohol but Pasteur thinks there’s life involved. The scientists take samples of beer from local breweries and study them under his microscope. He looks at fresh beer and spoil beer again and again for over a year. He looks for living creatures that hurt of help the alcohol. Finally a breakthrough, Pasteur find a key differences between good beer and bad. Good beer is full with round yeast cells. Spoil beer is swimming with long microbes. Pasteur heat the bad been and find something amazing. Heating the beer for only a few minutes killed the bad microbes. This simple technique becomes known as pasteurization and soon adopted for beer and wine. Pasteur thank scientists should share the discovery not patent their ideas but he changes his tune when he needs money for his laboratory. He applied for US Patent on May ninth 1873 and uses the proceeds to fund his work. SO where does the milk come in? Surprisingly pasteurization doesn’t hit the dairy industry for decades. Americans fear the new technology. They think it will destroy vitamins and make milk taste bad. They want nothing to do with pasteurization. That all changes at the turn of the century. Scientists discover that cows can spread disease through their milk. Even worse, bad milk is linked with the deadly disease at that day, tuberculosis. By 1907, scientists know that heating the milk can stop tuberculosis cold. Soon, Pasteur’s process is the law of the land. Milk will never be the same. Americans drink more than 6 billion gallons of milk a year and it hardly ever make them sick. Less than one percent diseases outbreak are caused by bad milk. For that you can thank Louis Pasteur and his pursuit of a better beer.