C293 Thoughts on Liquor Technology (1/2)

Because those subordinate officials were coming over, and there was still a period of time before that happened. Xiao Wen, who was bored to death, realized that he had nothing else to do, so he found a chair and sat down. He closed his eyes and started to read the information about the wine.

Originally, before the Yuan Dynasty, Chinese wine, although varied in the raw materials, can be roughly classified as brewing wine.

The so-called brewing wine, also known as fermented wine, raw wine, is to use the yeast effect, containing starch and sugar raw materials to ferment the material to produce alcohol composition to form wine. The production process includes saccharification, fermentation, filtration, sterilization and so on.

The principle behind its production wasn't particularly complicated.

In the course of brewing, the starch absorbs water, expands, heats up gelatinize, forms the starch with loose structure, and breaks down into low molecular monosaccharide under the action of amylase.

The monosaccharide is decomposed under the catalysis of decarboxylase and dehydrogenase to form carbon dioxide and alcohol.

Using starch as raw material to brew wine, two main processes are required, one is starch saccharification process and the other is alcohol fermentation process.

In fact, the process of saccharification is that the starches, cereals and wild plant raw materials are boiled under pressure, and starch gelatinization becomes dissolved, but it can't be directly used by yeast to ferment to produce alcohol.

Therefore, after boiling the gelatinized mash, a certain amount of saccharifying agent must be added before fermentation to turn the dissolved starch into yeast fermentable sugars. This process of conversion from starch to sugar is called saccharification.

The saccharification process is a function of amylase or acid hydrolysis, which turns starch into fermentable sugar.

The most commonly used saccharifying agents in the production of alcohol are malt and liqueur.

Malt is widely used as a saccharifying agent in Europe and the United States, the former Soviet Union and other countries.

In the era of the 21st century, alcohol was widely used as saccharifying agent, in addition, the use of enzyme preparation as saccharifying agent in foreign countries has become an inevitable trend.

Some countries, such as Neon, Big Wave, Hans, have been gradually popularized with enzymatic glycosylation.

These saccharifying agents contain a series of amylase, but different saccharification agents contain different enzymes.

The process of saccharification is a complex biochemical process, which includes liquefaction and saccharification. At the same time, a series of intermediate products have been changed. The final products are fermentable sugar and some of them are non-fermentable sugar.

And after the saccharification, the brewing process had to go through a layer of fermentation.

Fermentation refers to the hydrolysis of glucose by alcoholase to form ethanol (C2H5OH) to form fermentation broth (mass fraction of 10-18%).

Moreover, in the process of wine fermentation, many kinds of microorganisms and aromatic substances will be produced in the cellar, and slowly penetrate deep into the mud cellar, becoming a rich source of natural fragrance.

The older the cellar, the more microbes and aromatic substances there are, and the stronger the aroma. There are few and uneven microbes in the newly brewed pit, and its metabolism direction is uncertain. The wine has a heavy new taste of mud.

As the old mud cellar has been used for a long time, the beneficial microorganisms have been purified and enriched continuously, which makes the wine produced become better and better, and more and more fragrant. In general, after 20 years of natural maturity, the wine produced in the old mud cellar can be of good quality.

In ancient times, when the filtration technology of wine was not mature, wine was cloudy and was called ”white wine” or ”turbid wine”.

Later, at home and abroad, the application of high filtration precision and efficiency liquor filter has been developed, which has promoted the development of brewing industry. The use of wine filter makes the beer, wine, yellow wine and other clear, transparent and stable, and improves the appearance of finished wine, which not only reflects the high quality of wine, but also induces people's drinking desire.

But before this, the appearance of the wine was not particularly good. No one would dare praise it if they saw it, and they would only feel bored.

However, it is worth mentioning that brewing wine is the most natural way of brewing wine. The main brewing ingredients are grain and fruit, and the biggest characteristic is the original flavor.