Improving the Quality and Flavor of Monascus Rice Wine Brewed by Pure Culture Using the Addition of Trichosanthis Fructus
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Dear authors,
The article needs thorough revision. Discussion of the results is rather poor. There is no comparison with any of other technologies applied to the production of rice wine. There are also obvious errors in the GC-MS analysis of the volatile compounds. The manuscript is unacceptable to publish in its current form and it would need significant changes to be of acceptable quality.
Below are specific comments:
Abstract:
L. 10 Why is ‘trichosanthis fructus’ written in italics, while it is not an species name?
L. 16 ‘Increased flavour’?
Introduction:
L. 36 Is it ‘typical’? I wouldn’t say so, it is characteristic only for rice-based beverages originating in Asia. Typical SSF process is used worldwide in breweries, with Saccharomyces cereviasie yeast and exogenous amylases.
L. 40 What does ‘less flavour’ mean? Flavour is not something you can easily quantify.
L. 43-44 Pure culture of what? In the last paragraph you were talking about plants, not microorganisms.
L. 46 ‘Cucurbitaceae’ should be in italics.
Materials and methods
L. 76-78 What malt media? How were the microorganism separated from the medium to mix with cooked rice?
L. 96-98 Total amino acid nitrogen by NaOH titration? Additionally, please, add references to the methods used.
L. 140 Why are mentions of tables in red colour?
L.145 What solvent was used to prepare internal standard (2-octanol)?
What kind of fiber was used?
Results and Discussion
There is not much discussion in which authors compare used fruit additive to other fruit additives used in the production of rice wine.
L. 175-181 What was the extract content of the fruits used and what was the extract of the must/wort used for the wine? If the fruit was characterised with lower concentration of sugars than the wort, then addition of fruit would simply dilute the wort which would result in lower alcohol. Secondary metabolites might not have anything to do with this result. Additionally, very high concentration of reducing sugars in control sample would indicate that microorganisms had rather more problems in fermenting all the carbohydrates in the control sample, than in the samples with fruit.
Figure 4 is not clear. What does number 0, 0.5, 1 and 1.5 mean?
Additionally, some of the compounds which were detected are simply wrong. It looks like aauthors used GC-MS automatic method of identification and didn’t remove compounds which are typical artifacts or impurities from septa or the column phase. There is no possibility that such compounds as silanes, dihydroxyphenyl glycol silyl esters are natural component present in the rice wine. There is also high chance that various hydrocarbons are impurities or remnants of the solvent used for the internal standard. Please, analyse volatile compounds more closely. It would be also reasonable to run few ‘empty’ runs on the GC to see, what kind of compounds turn out on the chromatogram from the gas, column, ferrules or the septas used.
L.300-308 Are the changes significant or not?
Comments on the Quality of English Language
Manuscript is written in poor language, which makes many of the sentences incomprehensible or unclear. Some of the words are used wrongly, various sentences contain wording or phrases which are more typical for popular literature than scientific article.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The article describes the production of rice wine with the addition of a plant extract and shows very interesting results from a scientific and technical point of view.
Therefore, it deserves to be published after the following corrections are made:
Line 78 – how was the rice cooked?
Line 127 – correct to The.
Lines 140, 155, 172, … – Tables’ font in black colour.
Line 163 – which scale was used to score the wines?
Lines 179 to 181 – The authors should add to the likely explanation of the differences among the samples, the fact that the dilution of the wines would decrease initial sugar, so the fermentation was more complete simply because the ethanol level did not lead to stuck fermentation. The difference of about 60 g/l in residual sugar would be responsible for about 3.5% (v/v) ethanol.
Line 308 – experienced tasters, not consumers tasted samples.
Figure 5 – a statistical analysis was not performed. So, perhaps, except for CYW, all wines tasted alike. Discuss results as tendencies and not as differences. Authors should state this fact as an indication to do further acceptance tests with a large number of consumers.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Dear authors,
Your manuscript after the first round of revisions is far better than the previous version and I hope that you can see that the review was worth it.
My only comments for now are these:
You have described in the answer to my comments what are the changes in the carbohydrate content in the rice wines and why the addition of the fruit didn't shouldn't have a significant inlfuence on the concentration of sugars in the must/wort and the final product. I think that it would be reasonable to add some part of that explanation to the results & discussion section of the article. This way, the manuscript would shed more information about characteristics of the rice wine and possibilities of using fruit in production of these beverage.
"Thanks very much! The unit of the data bar is μg/mL, which has been added in the figure caption in the revised manuscript."
Possibly could you put the unit near the bar, not only in the description of the table?
Also, shouldn't Figure 5 be over the conclusions, not under it, as it is mentioned in the section 3.7?
Author Response
Comment 1: Your manuscript after the first round of revisions is far better than the previous version and I hope that you can see that the review was worth it.
The authors’ response: Thanks very much for your hard work on our manuscript! Your suggestions really improve our manuscript.
My only comments for now are these:
Comment 2: You have described in the answer to my comments what are the changes in the carbohydrate content in the rice wines and why the addition of the fruit didn't shouldn't have a significant influence on the concentration of sugars in the must/wort and the final product. I think that it would be reasonable to add some part of that explanation to the results & discussion section of the article. This way, the manuscript would shed more information about characteristics of the rice wine and possibilities of using fruit in production of these beverage.
The authors’ response: Thanks very much! Revisions have been performed as suggested and highlighted in red in the revised manuscript.
Comment 3: "Thanks very much! The unit of the data bar is μg/mL, which has been added in the figure caption in the revised manuscript."
Possibly could you put the unit near the bar, not only in the description of the table?
The authors’ response: Thanks very much! The unit has been put near the bar in the revised manuscript.
Comment 4: Also, shouldn't Figure 5 be over the conclusions, not under it, as it is mentioned in the section 3.7?
The authors’ response: Thanks very much! Figure 5 has been put under the section 3.7 in the revised manuscript.
