Chinese liquor is one of the worlds oldest distilled alcoholic beverages and an important commercial fermented product in China.The Chinese liquor fermentation process has three stages:making Daqu (the starter),stacking fermentation on the ground and liquor fermentation in pits.We investigated the bacterial diversity of Maotai and Guotai Daqu and liquor fermentation using high-throughput sequencing of the V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene.A total of 70,297 sequences were obtained from the Daqu samples and clustered into 17 phyla.The composition of the bacterial communities in the Daqu from these two soy sauce aroma-style Chinese liquors were the same,although some bacterial species changed in abundance.Between the Daqu and liquor fermentation samples,12 bacterial phyiay increased.The abundance of Lactobacillus and Pseudomonas increased in the liquor fermentation.