At one point in my life, I thought brewing beer would be a great hobby. And it was. The brewing itself was great, as was enjoying the beer afterward, but the bottling was a pain. It turned out I didn't like that at all, so I eventually quit making beer. Still, I'm glad I did it, because I learned a lot of things that I still use today. One of those things is the knowledge that beer yeast commits suicide. The yeast eats sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. The problem is that alcohol and CO2 aren't very good for yeast and they basically change their own environment so much that they can't survive in it. I keep coming back to this in my own mind as a warning to humanity -- if we're not careful, we'll be killed by your own waste. Yeast cells are mindless, we don't have that excuse.But another, less philosophical lesson is that certain natural processes can be halted by the process itself. The beer yeast are only capable of fermenting so much sugar; if you want much stronger beer than normal, you need a different strain of yeast. Champagne yeast, maybe, or a strain developed for barley wine. If not, all the yeast will die off before the job is done and your beer won't be any stronger, just sweeter.
All of this is just a way to explain the problem with oil plumes from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, natural bacteria will eventually consume the oil -- unless that oil is too concentrated. In this situation, the bacteria creates an environment where it can't survive. And neither can anything else. In terms of helping sea life, you aren't. You're just making an already unsurvivable environment worse... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
