Child's Health Primer For Primary Classes Part 6

4. What is often done with ripe grapes?

5. What happens after the grape-juice has stood a short time?

6. Why would the changed grape-juice not be good to use in making jelly?

7. Into what is the sugar in the juice changed?

8. What becomes of the gas?

9. What becomes of the alcohol?

10. What is gone and what left?

11. What is alcohol?

12. What does alcohol do to those who drink it?

13. When are grapes good food?

14. When is grape-juice not a safe drink?

15. Why?

16. What is this changed grape-juice called?

17. What is wine?

18. From what is wine made?

19. What do people sometimes think of home-made wines?

20. How can alcohol be there when none has been put into it?

21. What does alcohol make the person who takes it want?

22. What is such a one called?

23. What has wine done to many persons?

24. What does alcohol hurt?

25. How does it change a person?

26. Are you sure you will not become a drunkard if you drink wine?

27. Why should you not drink it?

28. What is cider made from?

29. What soon happens to apple-juice?

30. How may vinegar be made?

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote A: This gas is called car bon'ic acid gas.]

CHAPTER V.

BEER.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A]LCOHOL is often made from grains as well as from fruit.

The grain has starch instead of sugar.

If the starch in your mother's starch-box at home should be changed into sugar, you would think it a very strange thing.

Every year, in the spring-time, many thousand pounds of starch are changed into sugar in a hidden, quiet way, so that most of us think nothing about it.

STARCH AND SUGAR.

All kinds of grain are full of starch.

If you plant them in the ground, where they are kept moist and warm, they begin to sprout and grow, to send little roots down into the earth, and little stems up into the suns.h.i.+ne.

These little roots and stems must be fed with sugar; thus, in a wise way, which is too wonderful for you to understand, as soon as the seed begins to sprout, its starch begins to turn into sugar.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

If you should chew two grains of wheat, one before sprouting and one after, you could tell by the taste that this is true.

Barley is a kind of grain from which the brewer makes beer.

He must first turn its starch into sugar, so he begins by sprouting his grain.

Of course he does not plant it in the ground, because it would need to be quickly dug up again.

He keeps it warm and moist in a place where he can watch it, and stop the sprouting just in time to save the sugar, before it is used to feed the root and stem. This sprouted grain is called malt.

The brewer soaks it in plenty of water, because the grain has not water in itself, as the grape has.

He puts in some yeast to help start the work of changing the sugar into gas[B] and alcohol.

Sometimes hops are also put in, to give it a bitter taste.