Why beer being alcohol and dhaving hydroxyl group has acidic pH? I came across pH of around 60 different types of commercial beer varieties and the pH ranged to 3-5. What is the possible explanation for the acidic pH of beer?
Dear Bhuwan,
Beer has acidic pH because during fermentation not only ethanol is produced by the yeast. They produce organic acids (acetic, succinic...) and other metabolites like glycerol esters, higher alcohols, ketones as well. Moreover sometimes beer is acidified in a brewery because yeast grow and live better in sligtly acidic pH. Additionally brewer's wort right after mashing has sligtly acididc pH (for normal, pale malts its normally 5.6-5.9 but for other types it may vary but usually goes lower).
If you are not familiar with fermentation you can read about it in any student's book for brewing/fermentation technology.
Witek
Dear Bhuwan,
Beer has acidic pH because during fermentation not only ethanol is produced by the yeast. They produce organic acids (acetic, succinic...) and other metabolites like glycerol esters, higher alcohols, ketones as well. Moreover sometimes beer is acidified in a brewery because yeast grow and live better in sligtly acidic pH. Additionally brewer's wort right after mashing has sligtly acididc pH (for normal, pale malts its normally 5.6-5.9 but for other types it may vary but usually goes lower).
If you are not familiar with fermentation you can read about it in any student's book for brewing/fermentation technology.
Witek
Bhuwan
The -OH functional group is not easy to remove unless it is protonated by reacting the alcohol.
However reacting an alcohol with a nucleophile makes it easy to remove the H+ ion from the functional group, rendering a nucleophilic alcohol.
So in conclusion, Alcohol donates H+ easier than -OH which makes it a stronger nucleophile but a weak electrophile.
Its basically acidic
The whole production of brewing and beer making is performed under pH 6.
Alcohol itself a acidic hydrocarbon.
and the water, which is almost 95% of beer, used for brewing is having pH 6.2-6.4
Brewing Yeast can grow better in acidic environment.
plus CO2 (CO2 is slightly acidic in nature) , other then these many factors are there ....acids, esters and fusel oils.
Because the ATP-ase that deliver energy by the mitochondrial activity produce protons during the metabolism. These are excreted in the medium (outside the cell) and as consequence the liquid becomes acidic.
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