WSET Level 2 Award in Spirits Practice Exam 2025 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

The necessary process in grains to create sugar for fermentation is to convert the starch. Grains primarily consist of starches, which are complex carbohydrates. To initiate fermentation, these starches must first be broken down into simpler sugars, as yeast can only ferment sugars, not starches.

The conversion of starch to sugar is typically achieved through a process called saccharification, which involves enzymatic activity. This usually occurs during the mashing process, where grains are heated and mixed with water, allowing enzymes like amylase to break down the starches into fermentable sugars such as glucose and maltose.

While cooking the grains is an important step to facilitate this process by gelatinizing the starches, it is specifically the conversion of starch to sugar that directly enables fermentation to occur. Distillation comes later in the production process, primarily used to separate alcohol from the fermented liquid, and fermentation itself is the final action where yeast consumes the sugars to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide.