ABSTRACT
Over 5000 yr ago, some clever Egyptians figured out how to make bread and beer. The bread was probably leavened by a mixture of yeast and lactic acid bacteria, both of which were ingredients in the beer mash and foam that were used as a starter culture for bread production. The twofold biotechnological production was quite an ingenious accomplishment of bakers and brewers, who learned, with increasing sophistication, how to affect the processes by varying the amounts of flour, water, and starter, temperature and other conditions, even though they did not even know what the active ingredient in beer foam was until the middle of the 19th century [1].
