ABSTRACT
It is becoming increasingly important to differentiate complex mixtures, especially in forensics. Cachaça, the most popular alcoholic beverage in Brazil, is made from distilled and fermented sugar cane juice. It contains a mixture of naturally occurring polyphenols known as tannins, whose composition is dictated by the type of wood used to age the beverage. These tannins can be differentiated in an Indicator Displacement Assay (IDA) using peptide-based ternary sensing ensembles. This investigation demonstrates a technique for fingerprinting the identity of the woods used to age cachaças. Unknown cachaça samples were tested against a training set of Brazilian woods in addition to oaks from different countries. Results obtained from the analysis showed that 62.5% of the samples were correctly identified. Furthermore, four samples anonymously added to the pool of unknowns from the training set were identified with 100% accuracy, emphasizing both the promising results obtained from this method of differentiation and the importance of analyzing same-age samples.