How To Evaluate Mead Production?

2.3 Honey

Honey has been used by humans over several decades for its nutritive and therapeutic. It has been used as a sweetener and flavoring agent in foods and beverages. The sweetness of honey is due to the different forms of carbohydrate present in honey such as monosaccharides, fructose, glucose and disaccharides, maltose, isomaltose, maltulose, sucrose and turanose (Ayoub Meo et al., 2016). Honey is rich in Vitamin B6, Vitamin C, trace vitamin B, amino acids, antioxidants, folic acid, iron, minerals, zinc and niacin (David, 2007; Fatimah et al., 2013). Honeys contain high osmolarity and low pH which are combined through the enzymatic assembly of hydrogen peroxide makes honey have antimicrobial properties (Bang et al., 2003; Mandal & Mandal,
Mead is a traditional honey-derived beverage resulting from the alcoholic fermentation by yeasts of diluted honey. However, over the years there have been issues with mead production such off-flavors by yeast, lack of uniformity of the final products and slow or premature fermentation. To overcome this problem, a study was conducted to optimize mead production by using appropriate honey-must formulation to improve yeast performance alcoholic fermentation. Honey-must was centrifuged to reduce insoluble solids, followed by pasteurization for 10 min at 65 °C, and finally subjected to two different conditions which were addition of organic acids and nitrogen supplementation. The results showed that high quality mead is produced when there is correlation between nitrogen availability and the levels of ethyl and acetate esters (Mendes-Ferreira et al., 2010). In a recent study, honey was used as a functional substrate among other substrates such as soybean hydrolyzed extract and colostrum in producing probiotic beverages using kefir grains as starter culture. The fermentations were carried out for
Ultrasound can be used in several industries including the food industry. Ultrasound have been emerging in the food industry because ultrasound techniques are relatively simple, energy saving and cheap (Youssef, 2012). The several uses of ultrasound in the food industry are homogenization, crystallization, de-foaming, drying, filtration, meat tenderization, extraction and also as preservation technique. Ultrasound has the capability to eliminate microorganisms and enzymes without destroying the nutrients in the foods, making ultrasound an alternative method to thermal treatments in the food preservation (Ercan, 2013). Due to this, ultrasound have been widely used in the treatment of fruit and vegetable juice. One of the earliest use of ultrasound for fruit juice treatment was for orange juice. Sonication was carried out at amplitude levels of 40%, 70% and 100% for 2, 6 and 10 min at a constant frequency of 20 kHz. Samples were stored for periods of up to 30 days at 10oC. The impact of sonication on pH, oBrix, titratable acidity, colour values (L*, a*, b*), non-enzymatic browning (NEB), cloud value and ascorbic acid content on orange juice was analyzed. The results showed that storage of sonicated orange juice for 30days did not affect the titratable acidity and oBrix. However, storage showed good correlation on pH, colour, NEB, cloud value and ascorbic acid of sonicated orange juice