Quality control of beverages using XRS allied to chemometrics: determination of fixed acidity, alcohol and sucrose contents in Brazilian cachaca and cashew juice

The present work proposes a new method to evaluate parameters of quality control for beverages using X-ray spectrometry (XRS) allied to the chemometric tools such as principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least square regression for one variable (PLS 1). The chosen beverages were cachaca and cashew juice owing to their economic importance in Brazil. The first study, which was carried out with craft cachaca samples acquired in Amparo (Sao Paulo State), established a relationship between color and sucrose content of the product and also calibrated their fixed acidities and alcoholic contents. The second study constructed multivariate models for sucrose content in commercial cachaca and cashew juice and also determined the predictive power of the method. The maximum relative errors for the predicted values of 2.9 and 2.3% for cachaca and cashew juice, respectively, demonstrate that the methods are quite promising for the quality control of these beverages. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.