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 at 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 CFU/ml). By contrast, APCs were reduced significantly