Browsing by Author "Alakolanga, A. G. A.W."

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    Effect of Tea bag materials on physical and chemical quality parameters of Black Tea during storage
    (Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka, 2015) Pathirana, P. C. S.; Alakolanga, A. G. A.W.; Premathilake, U. D. A. T.
    The tea (Camellia sinensis) produced in Sri Lanka is popular as “Ceylon tea” and has a higher demand as ‘best quality tea’ in the international trade. Packing tea into bags in many forms has become very popular because of convenience and it can be considered as an effective form of value addition. Though tea bags are used as packaging strategy in order to protect the quality parameters of tea during storage, while extending the shelf life, there are many quality claims against tea bag materials. The other bad news is that paper tea bags may be just as bad, or worse, than the plastic ones because many of them are treated with epichlorohydrin, a compound mainly used in the production of epoxy resins. The purpose of this research was to evaluate effect of different types of tea bag packaging materials on physical and chemical parameters of tea and selecting best tea bag packaging material. Methodology There are three types of tea bag materials as Paper, Soilon and Nylon that used to export tea in Sri Lanka, were used for this research. Those tea bags contained black tea with same manufacturing date, and also they were received from same tea exporting company. Each tea bag was consisting with Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings (BOPF) grade of black tea and tea bags were in same shape, size and same weight (2.5g) of tea. Each type of tea bag was packed in same size of sealed cardboard boxes and they were stored in normal room temperature. Each box was consisted with 25 tea bags. Tea bags were stored for three months duration. Every experiment was conducted three times at same time intervals in each month of during storage period and data was collected in each month. Experiments were conducted using selected physical and chemical quality parameters of black tea. Moisture content, dry matter, brightness, total colour were measure as physical quality parameters and total polyphenols, caffeine, thearubigin, theaflavin and thearubigin to theaflavin ratio was measured as chemical quality parameters. Three replicates were carried out for each type of materials in each experiment. Every experiment was conducted according to ISO procedures recommended for black tea. All data were expressed using descriptive statistics as means, standard deviations and coefficient of variations of triplicate measurements and analysed by using Minitab 16 software. Significant effects were tested by conducting two sample t-tests for each packaging materials by comparing with the initial data set of each material separately. Values of P<0.05 were considered as significantly different (α=0.05).