ABSTRACT
One of the most important fermented food products are the alcoholic beverages, and a number of such beverages have been prepared and consumed by mankind since ancient times in most of the world’s cultures (Borgstrom, 1968; Joshi and Pandey, 1999; Sekar and Mariappan, 2007; Tamang, 2008; Joshi et al., 2011a; Kanwar et al., 2011). Traditional alcohol brewing has been a home-based industry, mostly carried out by rural women using indigenous knowledge of fermentation. e common knowledge of making fermented alcoholic beverages is believed to have originated from the Yunnan-Guizhou provinces of China.
