METHOD OF HONEY IDENTIFICATION BASED ON ISOTOPE MASS SPECTROMETRY Russian patent published in 2023 - IPC A01K59/00 

FIELD: food industry.

SUBSTANCE: honey samples are fermented with the yeast Saccharamyces cerevisiae, followed by distillation of ethanol, in order to determine the isotopic characteristics of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in ethanol. Fermentation is carried out at a temperature of 20± 2°C. Distillation is carried out as follows. 25 cm³ of fermented honey wort is placed in a flask with a capacity of 50 cm³ and ethanol is extracted at a temperature of 78.0°C up to 78.5°C, at least 98% of the distillate is collected from the sample. The installation used for ethanol extraction should not lead to fractionation of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in the resulting sample. Next, aliquots of the distillate are separately subjected to isotopic mass spectrometric analysis to establish the abundance ratios of stable isotopes of a particular element: ¹³С/¹²С, ¹⁸О/¹⁶О, D/H. The obtained quantitative characteristics are compared with each other and with predetermined characteristics of control samples. Ethanol samples from known sources, namely natural honey, corn syrup, beet sugar, cane sugar, molasses and glucose-fructose syrup, are used as controls. The nature of the ethanol formed in honey is considered based on the degree of compliance or deviation of the obtained isotopic characteristics of the sample.

EFFECT: invention provides an accurate and reliable analysis that allows to make a conclusion about the origin of ethanol in fermented honey samples.

1 cl, 1 tbl, 6 ex