[stubish]

Even more confusing: "We mixed the fermenting agent with sorghum flour to keep the traditional color and aroma of sorghum, the traditional fermenting agent of banana wine"

So they developed a yeast to replace the sorghum as the fermenting agent, and then mix sorghum in. What has been gained? Does yeast make for a more controlled fermentation making regulation easier? Or just easier to industrialize?

I suspect that using sorghum for fermentation really means using whatever wild yeast happened to be on the sorghum, and the results too variable to regulate for commercial sale or export.

[dmurray]

> I suspect that using sorghum for fermentation really means using whatever wild yeast happened to be on the sorghum, and the results too variable to regulate for commercial sale or export.

Definitely this. Sorghum is not a "fermenting agent": it's not an organism that eats sugars and shits out alcohol and carbon dioxide (actually, it's pretty much the opposite). It's just somewhere wild yeast likes to live.