Edel Brau “It’s the beer” 1907

The topic of fermentation is an interesting one, and there was a surprising amount of information about it here in the Valley Library. After a day or two of struggling of what to look up, it dawned on me to figure out what kinds of food can be fermented. I had always known about pickled eggs, sauerkraut, vinegar, etc., but it just never clicked in my head that “hey, those are fermented!”

Once I had the stroke of genius, it was easier to find information, and boy is there information about fermentation. Unsurprisingly, there’s a bit of information regarding fermentation in Food Microbiology, as well as a lot of overlap in terms of sources for the fermented food items. There’s also a lot of information about wine, beer, and cider. Mead was a difficult one that kept bringing up different people with the name Mead.

To help make searching for these things easier, I also made up a map of the general locations that have information on each of these fermentation topics and gave ideas of their call numbers.