Determination And Comparison Of Alcohols Content In Local Alcoholic Beverages Made Of Diferrent Cereals

Abstract

One of the most consumed fermented alcoholic beverages is tella, which is made mostly with barley but wheat, maize, sorghum, and teff are utilized depending on the region. Tella fermentation was carried out using traditional methods.The main objective of this work was the direct determination and comparison of ethanol and methanol level in traditional fermented alcoholic beverages of home prepared tella samples from different cereals and tella sample purchased from vending house using Alcolyzer beer method and GCFID method respectively. The ethanol content of Arekie sample was determined using pycnometer method.). The average ethanol content of Tella samples ranged from3.00% to 6.91%v/v and pH ranged from 4.41 to 5.43. In all of the tella samples there is significant variation in ethanol content and however, in pH values there is no significant variation between the tella samples BTC and MTC, MTC and BMTC, whereas there is significance variation between tella beverages BTC and BMTC, BTC and PTC, MTC and PTC as indicated statistically with one way ANOVA (at p =0.05) level.The average alcohol content of arekie was found to be 49.02%v/v which is higher than the reported value of terra arekie 37.22%v/v or even than that of dagim arekie 48%v/v. The GC analysis of tella and arekie indicates that there is methanol in all of the samples with the highest concentration in barley tella and least in the mixture of barley and maize tella beverages.