Improving the quality of instant tea with low-grade tea aroma

Refuse tea is industrially identified as broken mixed fannings (BMF). It is a primary raw material for instant tea production. The aroma escape during the process affects the quality of instant tea used for application in the food and beverage industries. Capturing and adding back aroma to the instant tea is commercially important to overcome this drawback. Hence, the study was focused on profiling the aroma of BMF and respective instant tea based on low country (0–300 m MASL) and upcountry (>600 m MASL) elevation categories of Sri Lanka to identify the impact of growing elevation on aroma profiles to explore blending proportions for better aroma profiles. Furthermore, volatiles that escaped with steam during the instant tea production process were condensed, and this aroma extract was added back to the tea concentrate prior to spray drying to produce the aroma blended instant tea sample (ABIT). Solid-phase microextraction followed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry was used to identify the volatile compounds in the headspace of instant tea, BMF and ABIT samples. BMF samples significantly contained linalool (9.94 ± 2.94 %), cis-linalool oxide (Furanoid) (4.69 ± 1.80 %), geraniol (2.47 ± 1.44 %), and 3-hexen-1-ol (3.46 ± 2.06 %); however, the volatile profile of instant tea samples had high amounts of hydrocarbons (51.60 ± 9.34 %) that did not contribute to creating a pleasant aroma for the product. Hexanal, geraniol, citral, cis-jasmon, α-ionone, nerol and E-2-Z-4-hexadienal are characteristic in upcountry BMF and were absent in the low country tea, indicating a difference in the aroma profiles with elevation. ABIT sample showed that there is a clear improvement in the aroma profile by retaining compounds such as linalool (5.48 %), geraniol (0.95 %), hotrienol (0.92 %), and γ-muurolene (0.22 %), which give a pleasant flowery aroma to the product. This study concluded the possibility to improve the aroma profile of instant tea to give the unique aroma of Ceylon tea as per customer requirements in an economically viable manner and this technology can be applied globally.