Identification and Traceability of Spiritous Drinks based on UV-spectrometry and Conductometry

This article is devoted to the identification and detection of adulterated alcoholic beverages on the example of brandy and vodka. According to different opinions, up to 40% of spiritous beverages turn out to be adulterated or counterfeit. Most commonly used to identify such adulteration analytical methods are either too expensive or time-demanding. The other important thing that there is no standard method developed for objective tracing of spirits to the level of a production lot. The paper proposes an express method for detecting adulterated alcoholic beverages based on the use of two analytical methods of different nature: conductometry and UV-spectrometry. The possibility of these methods’ joint use for identification of alcoholic beverages with the standard or by common features (non-signature identification) is proved by the usage of statistical methods on data got from analytical measurements and sensory evaluation of 171 drinks’ samples. The samples represent different countries of product origin, brands, ageing periods. Firstly we found out informative wavelength bands, spectral curve forms and conductivity limits for different types of drinks, both genuine and adulterated – adulteration was previously revealed by sensory test. Then, using k-means cluster analysis we developed typical spectra for 2 ‘styles’ of genuine brandies and adulterated brandies, for vodkas the same work was done using simpler statistical techniques (means and variation analysis). Finally, an algorithm for spiritous beverages identification and tracing is given. Additionally, changes in the values of the electrical conductivity and UV spectra during shelf life that do not affect the suitability of the proposed method were studied.