Research Article - Journal of Food Technology and Preservation (2025) Volume 9, Issue 2

Importance of handcrafting methods on quality of tea.

Differential drying methods produce different types of handcrafted teas. Freshly harvested teas collected from VVTEA farm, Fatapukur, Jalpaiguri are taken for different types of drying processes including only viz. only sundrying, hotwater treated sundrying, hotwater treated shadedrying processes. Industrial processing of white tea could be corroborated with only sundrying and hotwater with drying methods could be correlated with the steaming process of industrially prepared green tea. Handcrafted teas are made by small growers which also contributes towards economic value of North Bengal grown tea. Different types of such drying methods have contributed towards different quality parameters like commercial qualities viz. color, aroma and therapeutic values like antioxidant, antimicrobial potentials.

The commercial and therapeutic values are indicated by the biochemical quality parameters like polyphenols or catechins (standards like gallic acid, epigallocatechin gallate) flavonoids (standards like rutin, quercetin etc.). Evaluation of such quality parameters were observed by different bioinstrumentation techniques like FTIR, HPLC, TLC, spectrophotometric scan, E-nose measurement. Physico-chemical parameters like moisture content and ash contents ate also indicator of quality parameters of handcrafted teas. In this paper such physic-chemical and biochemical evaluation of quality parameters indicates the best method as hotwater and sundrying handcrafted process which is equivalent to commercially available green tea.

Author(s):

Sudeshna Shyam Choudhury*, Debapriya Maitra, Bedaprana Roy, Sejuti Roy, Sony Choubey, Anindita Roy Chowdhury, Bipasha Saha, Anwesha Biswas, Abhas Chatterjee, Sruti Thakur, Srimoyee Sen, Biswanath Ganguly, Arup Kumar Mitra

Abstract PDF