ALCOHOL 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 sunshine.

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.

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 and alcohol.

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

The brewer watches to see the bubbles of gas that tell, as plainly as words could, that sugar is going and alcohol is coming.

When the work is finished, the barley has been made into beer.

It might have been ground and made into barley-cakes, or into pearl barley to thicken our soups, and then it would have been good food. Now, it is a drink containing alcohol, and alcohol is a poison.

You should not drink beer, because there is alcohol in it.

Two boys of the same age begin school together. One of them drinks wine, cider, and beer. The other never allows these drinks to pass his lips. These boys soon become very different from each other, because one is poisoning his body and mind with alcohol, and the other is not.

A man wants a good, steady boy to work for him. Which of these two do you think he will select? A few years later, a young man is wanted who can be trusted with the care of an engine or a bank. It is a good chance. Which of these young men will be more likely to get it?

REVIEW QUESTIONS.

1. Is there sugar in grain?

2. What is in the grain that can be turned into sugar?

3. What can you do to a seed that will make its starch turn into sugar?

4. What does the brewer do to the barley to make its starch turn into sugar?

5. What is malt?

6. What does the brewer put into the malt to start the working?

7. What gives the bitter taste to beer?

8. How does the brewer know when sugar begins to go and alcohol to come?

9. Why does he want the starch turned to sugar?

10. Is barley good for food?

11. Why is beer not good for food?

12. Why should you not drink it?

13. Why did the two boys of the same age, at the same school, become so unlike?

14. Which will have the best chance in life?