A feasible spectrophotometric method for determining acidic and neutral pol
ysaccharides in cider is described, and the advantages of this method are e
xamined 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 leas
t squares (PLS), allowed us to typify the ciders on the basis of their foam
ing properties, Acidic polysaccharide and 1-propanol were the most relevant
variables for this purpose.