About 30 years ago there was a TV show in the UK called 'Tomorrows World', showed you how bright the future was going to be. Most of what you saw sank without trace but a few gizmos made it, pre-natal ultra sound scanners is one I remember.
I'd be doubting my memory on this one except that I watched it with a friend and we talked about it for a while. As I remember, there was a special foam and the foam had 'cells' each just big enough to hold an individual yeast cell. The demo showed a funnel holding a cone of foam (and yeast) with a wash above and alcohol was dripping out the bottom. Sure woke this homebrewer up.
Never heard of it again so safe to say it didn't work properly but I'm hoping someone else has heard of it and maybe why it didn't make it into full production.
I think the end result was basicaly foul, the high surface area is a great idea in theory but yeast don't always behave themselves and in these sort of systems chuck out a lot of undesirable compounds. A few years ago there was a system developed for 'maturation' of lager that claimed to work in hours - again it was a high surface area yeast thing and didn't make it past tasting.
I've heard of a cell system used for the bacterial process of making Butanol, and it's done because the same way ethanol is toxic to yeast
butanol is many times more toxic to the cultured bacteria that produce it...
but even more toxic to the bacteria is the Acetone that is also produced
(some ethanol is produced as well)
So they cycle the feedstock through the bacteria chamber, seperate the butanol, ethanol and acetone(!) and recycle the un-spent feedstock back into the system...
The idea holds some promise for production of industrial or fuel alcohol
but for something you'd want to drink? I'll pass....
I think what they were probably doing is similar to the method used by some companies to produce alcohol-free beer... they seperate the alcohol out through a selectively permeable membrane, I.E. Reverse osmosis filtration, I'm Not sure I like the idea of drinking the results of that process either...
