ASIN: B006HDILUU
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Pages: 340
Ben Ketchum is an assistant professor at a small college in Montana with just one year left to secure his tenure or he’s going to be out of a job, this at a time when there are already alarming cutbacks going on in science due to Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. And as if to complicate his life further, the all important anthrax grant Ben was counting on didn’t come through so now he’s forced to begin a new project, this one involving a different type of microbe than what he’s used to: the brewer’s yeast. To learn all he can about the yeast, Ben takes two weeks off and travels first to exotic Egypt where he discovers the yeast’s role in building this once-great civilization, including brewing beer, making wine, raising bread as well as the pyramids. He then travels to Germany, a more recent example of a beer culture, where he uncovers the yeast’s influence in Western civilization ...
