3.3. Microbial composition of the final rice wine The microbial composition of the final rice wines at the different plants are presented in Table 4. Mean bacterial populations are shown in the right section of Fig. 2. Plant A produces only sterile products, and accordingly, no analysis of a non-sterile rice wine was performed. APCs the non-sterile turbid rice wine stage 11 were similar to those of the previous secondary fermentation stage. APCs for the final product ranged from 79 to 8.9 log CFU/ml (mean 8.4 log CFUlml). By contrast, APCs were reduced significantly