Analysis of polysaccharides in cider: their effect on sensory foaming properties

A feasible spectrophotometric method for determining acidic and neutral polysaccharides in cider is described, and the advantages of this method are examined with respect to precision, accuracy, and detection and quantitation limits. The concentration of nonvolatile and volatile components in cider, together with chemometric techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA), soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), and partial least squares (PLS), allowed us to typify the ciders on the basis of their foaming properties. Acidic polysaccharide and 1-propanol were the most relevant variables for this purpose.