 Hey everyone, I'm Leslie Gohans, the 4-H Foundation Agent in Culver County. Thank you for joining me today for the 4-H BioFuel Glass Activity. Biofuels offer us an alternative to our traditional petroleum-based fossil fuels. Petroleum-based fossil fuels are non-renewable and a finite resource, meaning we cannot make any more of them, so what we have is what we have. So this is where biofuels plays a part in fueling our future world. Today we're going to talk about the biofuel ethanol and how it is produced. Ethanol production starts on the farm. Farmers produce the corn, sugar is processed out of the corn and into its pure state of fructose. Fructose is then added to the fermentation process, which is what we're going to do today. After that process, one of the products is ethanol. The fermentation process is a biological process that results in a chemical transformation. And this is done by a single-sailed fungus called yeast. There's a fungus, a fungus! The yeast take the sugar as their food source. They consume it and they have two waste products, the CO2 and the ethanol. So for the activity today, you will need two empty water bottles. These are the small ones, but if you have the large ones, you can use those as well too. Two balloons, dried inactive yeast. You can find this in the grocery stores by all the baking goods. It's inactive now. As soon as you add it to warm water, it comes alive because it is a living organism. You also need corn syrup. This is also found over by all the other sweeteners and baking goods. And warm water. It has to be warm, not too hot or it will damage the yeast. So for the experiment today, take your first bottle and fill it about two-thirds of the way full with warm water. Again, not hot water. And then you're going to add some of the dried inactive yeast right now. If you buy in the store, it's inactive. As soon as you introduce it to warm water, it comes alive because it is a living organism. We're going to add our sugar. This is our corn syrup. This is going to serve as the food for the yeast and the fuel, you could say, for our fermentation process. Then you're going to put the balloon over the top of the bottle. Be careful that you don't have any holes around the edges. You will think that the process isn't working, but it is. Just make no hole. If you want to shake it, put your fingers kind of over the balloon and shake it. Now we'll let that sit to the side. For our second bottle, this is going to be our control or our blink for the experiment. So this is what we'll compare and model our experiment to. So this is going to contain just the yeast and warm water, no food source. So then we can actually know what the actual food source does in this bottle. And now we wait. The fermentation process in action. So here's our trial that we put the sugar in with, the corn syrup with the yeast and the warm water. Here is our blink or our control with no sugar, just the yeast and water. There's a huge difference. And this has only been about 5 to 10 minutes. As you can see over here, there has been active fermentation going on. The yeast are consuming the sugar and we know this because of the CO2. And since the CO2 is produced, we also know that the ethanol is produced. Wow! So this is now an hour out and we can see that there's even more CO2 that was produced from the fermentation process. So the yeast are still in there actively consuming the sugar and producing the CO2 and also the ethanol, which is the biofuel. This is amazing and it is a biological process that is being done by a living organism, the yeast. You can also smell it. It smells like fresh bread because that is what causes the air bubbles and the fluffiness in bread is the yeast producing the CO2 during that baking process. So thank you guys. See you soon.