Making Antibubbles in Beer from Belgium

An anonymous reader writes "About.com reports on "Antibubbles in beer from Belgium". Scientists in Belgium have studied the movement of antibubbles (the exact opposite of regular bubbles) in Flemish beer. They found that the beer was very similar, but not the same as, dishwater. You can also learn how to make antibubbles in your kitchen from soapy water."

Comments

Antibubbles bursting

[hurtstotouchfire]

Dr Dorbolo said "We also found that when they die, or burst, they morph into a form of structure which we have nicknamed the jellyfish form because it looks very like a jellyfish swimming through water. It slowly moves and fades away until it disappears altogether."

For anyone who's seen a slow motion video of a bubble bursting, that sounds like it looks very similar. The whole forming and bursting of antibubbles is interesting, because from the articles it sounds like they're very similar to normal bubbles. That seems like it would imply some kind of air-counterpart to surface tension.

Re:Antibubbles bursting

[Megasphaera Elsdenii]

> That seems like it would imply some kind of air-counterpart to surface tension.

No; the general term is interface tension, and its behaviour and magnitude is a function of the media on both sides of the interface. In case one of the media is air, it's called the surface tension (of beer, in the current case), but it implicitly involves the air as well.

these look like bicelles

[McDrewbie]

At least looking at the picture for makign antibubbles with dishwater, these merely look like bicelles. Basically, the detergents line up so that their hydrophobic tails interact and their hydrophilic head groups form a barrier on each side, just like a lipid bilayer in a cell membrane. Air is in the tail layer, and water inside and outside.

antibubbles and decomposition

[photoblur]

An antibubble is a droplet of fluid surrounded by an gasseous membrane, as opposed to a fluid membrane around air. Of course, creating a gasseous membrane is a much more difficult proposition than creating a fluid membrane, which is why this is such an interesting discovery. (well, that and because it relates science and beer...)

When discussing the death of the antibubble, Dr. Dorbolo states:

We also found that when they die, or burst, they morph into a form of structure which we have nicknamed the jellyfish form because it looks very like a jellyfish swimming through water. It slowly moves and fades away until it disappears altogether.

Wouldn't an antibubble just decompose to form a regular bubble of gas within the liquid? Or is he saying that the gas is re-dissolved into the beer?

Re:yeah, but....

[Scott Wood]

Water goes down smoother than any beer; I'd expect it to still be the case if you added enough vodka to bring it up to a typical beer's strength. However, some of us want more than just alcohol, "goes down smooth", and cheapness from our beers.

And yes, I've had MGD before. I'll pass.

Re:Misnomer, and more antibub info

[amasci]

The exact opposite of a bubble would be an airborn droplet.

Yes and no. True, the opposite of an UNDERWATER bubble is an airborne droplet.

However, the opposite of a soap bubble in air drifting on the breeze is an antibubble drifting around underwater.

The part about beer is interesting because it's analogous to blowing soap bubbles on an extremely humid day: the bubbles last longer, or possibly last forever if the air is slightly supersaturated.

An antibubble in beer would collect more and more carbon dioxide into its thin gas layer. If it didn't touch the fluid surface from below, there'd be no reason for it to burst.

Although first observed and studied almost a century ago, no one until now has been able to determine how they form.

Yeah, right. Even little kids have been making antibubbles since that article came out in 1974. If you've tried making them, it's totally obvious how they form. Perhaps what's not totally obvious is why a thin layer of air is stable underwater. But if detergents can stablize an air/water interface in a normal bubble, then this explains both a water film in the air, and an air film underwater.

Antibub trivia: antibubbles have "rainbow" colors, but the rainbows in the opposite place from a soap bubble: they appear at the bottom of the sphere. And of course the rainbows in both bubbles and antibubbles are not rainbows, instead they're antirainbows: dark spectral slots in white light. They're bands of "subtractive colors;" cyan, magenta, yellow.

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