Two Years Monitoring of Ethyl Carbamate in Sugar Cane Spirit from Brazilian Distilleries

Rafaela Bueno,Valquíria Silva,Angélica Tonin,Claudio Oliveira,Eduardo Meurer,Jesuí Visentainer,Marcos Ribeiro,Camila Poliseli,Nayane Sinosaki

doi:10.21577/0103-5053.20200031

Abstract

This paper describes the monitoring of ethyl carbamate concentration in sugar cane spirit from industrial distilleries in Brazil. In total, 18 distilleries from Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo states were evaluated, with, a total of 336 samples from August 2017 to August 2019. The ethyl carbamate was analyzed using a previously validated mass spectrometric method. Analytical curves presented coefficient of determination (R2) values higher than 0.99, and quality control samples showed a relative standard deviation (RSD) below 9%. Concentrations of ethyl carbamate ranged from not detected to 1608 µg L-1, with mean values of 294.2, 280.7 and 230.0 µg L-1 in 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively. On average, 46, 44 and 69% of samples presented levels of ethyl carbamate below 210 µg L-1. A variety of factors may have led to distillery A having a low level (ca. 115 µg L-1) of ethyl carbamate, including controlled temperature, yeast strain, post-harvesting quality, sugar cane variety choice, and the treatment process on the sugar cane juice, which goes towards the addition of Ca(OH)2, heating and freezing. These results showed the importance of internal quality control, and that sugar cane juice treatment may be a way to decrease ethyl carbamate in the distilleries.

Highlights

Ethyl carbamate, or urethane, is an organic compound naturally occurring on fermented food, such as fruit, cereals, sugar cane, shoyu, and wines.[1,2,3,4,5] Despite its presence in food, it has been studied as a carcinogenic compound
The initial way to proceed with the investigations of real sugar cane spirit samples from distilleries was to find sugar cane spirits with an ethyl carbamate concentration as low as possible
An overall reduction of the concentration levels of ethyl carbamate was verified in sugar cane spirits from 18 distilleries over the years of 2017 and 2019

Summary

Introduction

Urethane, is an organic compound naturally occurring on fermented food, such as fruit, cereals, sugar cane, shoyu, and wines.[1,2,3,4,5] Despite its presence in food, it has been studied as a carcinogenic compound. As there was no blank sample available to perform calibration curves, the standard addition method was used to find sugar cane spirit with the lowest ethyl carbamate concentration. Quality control consisted of a previously analyzed real sample with a concentration ranging from 255 to 481 μg L-1 of ethyl carbamate.

Results

Conclusion