Modelling and optimisation of enzymatic extrusion pretreatment of broken rice for rice wine manufacture

The manufacture of Chinese rice wine involves an uneconomical, time-consuming, and environmentally unfriendly pretreatment process. In this study, the enzymatic extrusion of broken rice was applied to the brewing of rice wine. The response surface methodology was used to study the effects of the barrel temperature (BT), moisture content (MC), and amylase concentration (AC) on the alcohol yield. A second-order polynomial model had a good fit to the experimental data and the coefficient of determination (R2) was 0.9879. According to the model, the optimal parameters required to obtain the highest alcoholic degree of 17.94% were: BT = 100.14 °C, MC = 43%, and AC = 1.45‰. Under these optimal conditions, the alcoholic degree actually reached 18.3%, which was close to the value predicted by the model. Enzymatic extrusion improved the yeast growth and alcohol yield during the fermentation process. The fermentation recovery and efficiency of processed rice wine were 38.07% and 94.66%, respectively.