Data underlying Figures 1-4 of: Cereal matrix shapes acidification and volatile compound formation, but not culturable bacterial counts, in boza, a fermented cereal beverage

This dataset contains source data underlying Figures 1-4 of Fink et al. (2026), Journal of Cereal Science 131, 104544. The study compared three cereal matrices (maize flour, millet flour, and purified maize starch) and three inoculum sources (sour cream, a boza-derived inoculum, and an industrial mesophilic dairy starter) during 48 h fermentation at 22 °C in three independent experimental repetitions. The deposited data include pH trajectories, titratable acidity, culturable aerobic bacterial counts, and GC-MS concentration data for the five volatile compounds presented in Figure 4. Each figure archive contains the original XLSX workbook. Figure 5 is conceptual and has no underlying numerical dataset.