1. Capable of being fermented.
1731–7. Miller, Gard. Dict. (ed. 3), s.v. Wine.… These fermentable Bodies may be reduced to the following Classes.
1795. Burke, Corr. (1844), IV. 271. This fermentable sap portends the dry rot at no very remote distance.
1850. Daubeny, Atom. Th., x. (ed. 2), 347. No fermentation takes place within the grape itself, because the cells which contain the saccharine and other fermentable matters, are distinct from those including the material which sets on foot the action.
1869. E. A. Parkes, A Manual of Practical Hygiene (ed. 3), 96. The amount of these germs in the air appears to be in proportion to the organic impurity of the atmosphere, since organic fermentable liquids change very slowly, or not at all, when exposed to calcined air, or to pure mountain air, but very rapidly when exposed to vitiated air.
fig. 1732. Hist. Litteraria, IV. 22. He proceeds to range fermentable Subjects into Classes.
1840. Mill, Ess. (1859), II. 408. It is to be feared that the appointment of a president by the direct suffrages of the community will prove to be the most serious mistake which the framers of the French Constitution have made. They have introduced by it into the still more fermentable elements of French society—what even in America is felt to be so great an evil—the turmoil of a perpetual canvass, and the baneful habit of making the decision of all great public questions depend less upon their merits than upon their probable influence on the next presidential election.
2. Capable of causing fermentation, rare.
1846. J. Baxter, Libr. Pract. Agric. (ed. 4), I. 133. The fermented liquor must be separated as much as possible from the yeast or fermentable matter.
Hence Fermentability, the quality of being fermentable.
1788. Projects, in Ann. Reg., 85. Newman … was unwilling to admit of the fermentability of milk.
