Effect of Electron Beam Radiation on Main Aroma Components of Chinese Baijiu

Abstract

—Aging process plays an important role in high quality liquor production. The liquor natural aging process usually takes a very long time, which causes serious financial burden for wineries. Therefore, much efforts have been paid to develop new technologies for shortening aging time. In this work, the effect of electron beam radiation on main aroma components of Baijiu is investigated in detail. The factors of radiation doses and storage time or/ conditions are taken into consideration. Results show that the main aroma component is hexanoic acid ethyl ester, whose content can increase after radiation without depending on the radiation dose changes. Both the dissolved O 2 of liquor and storage temperature have strong effect on the liquor radiation aging process. The number of the aroma components decreases with increasing of radiation dose, and this phenomenon is more obvious for the group of radiation at N 2 condition. Comparing to the control group, both the ester species and the hexanoic acid ethyl ester content decrease with storage time going, but the specie numbers of alcohol, ketones, alkane and others increase, even back to the initial level of just the end of radiation. Though the results indicate that the aged Baijiu by radiation technique shows a return back tendency in a certain degree after a period of storage time, the Baijiu still is aged with fast and high efficient after radiation. This report can provide some basic data for the application of radiation technique in the liquor aging, and open a new window for liquor aging technique research.