Chemical traceability of industrial and natural yeasts used in the production of Brazilian sugarcane spirits

• The first chemical traceability of cachaças’ fermentative process was carried out.
• A correlation between analytical data and samples were achieved using PCA and LDA.
• The influence of distillation apparatus was evaluated.
• LDA correctly classified 83% of columns’ cachaças according to the fermentation type.

The traceability of the fermentative process during the production of Brazilian sugarcane spirits (cachaças) was investigated for different yeast strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Two different distillation apparatus were used for this purpose: copper alembic stills and stainless steel columns. The data set (44 chemical compounds and 105 samples of sugarcane spirits) including products from column and alembic, treated with Principal Components Analysis showed that the concentrations of ethyl lactate, dimethyl sulfide and acetic acid are correlated with the natural fermentation process. For the samples distilled in stainless steel column, the first three principal components account for 77.7% of the total variance (PC1—54.9%; PC2—13.4%; PC3—10.3%). Linear discriminant analysis using as chemical descriptors ethyl hexanoate, ethyl dodecanoate, ethyl lactate, ethyl octanoate, ethyl decanoate, isoamyl octanoate, dimethyl sulfide, isobutyl alcohol and isoamyl alcohol provides a robust chemical model able to correctly classify 83% of the cachaças according to their respective fermentation process. A less clear classification (predictive ability of 42%) was observed for the sugarcane spirits distilled in the alembic stills.