Green tea, known as unfermented tea, is a popular beverage in the world. 5000 years ago, people pluck fresh tea leaves and exposure to sun to dry. Green tea is also recognized as herbal medicine treat from depression to headache. Based on the experiment and practice, green tea is reputed to be benefit in some areas like cancer, infection, high cholesterol and impaired immune function.

The more important of green tea is the flavor and smell. Unraveling incredible variety of tastes, textures and aromas of your favorite tea is a good way to start a new day. Studies have shown that almost 85% of what we taste is actually due to what we smell. Therefore, how to retain tea original smell and aroma is the most important stage in the tea making process. The primary processing of green tea are fixation, rolling and drying. As the time goes by, few traditional processing methods still remain today, more people initiate to use new drying method and solution instead of conventional hot air and steaming etc. The traditional green tea drying and fixation methods has some disadvantages such as low efficiency, burning coal make much pollution, frequently maintenance as the complicated system, inconsistence of tea quality.

Fuzhou University and Beijing University work together to carry about an experiment about the new drying technologies influence on green tea. The experiment is investigated by comparing to four drying solution hot air (AD), vacuum drying(VD), microwave drying(MD) and microwave vacuum drying(MVD). There are two tables showing the difference for four drying methods.

The required drying time was about 100 min for hot air drying, 70 min for vacuum drying, 10 min for microwave drying, and 5 min for microwave vacuum drying, respectively. Microwave drying is 10 times faster than hot air drying method.

Nutrition Retain in Four Drying Solution

Investigation indicates that highest score of sensory evaluation was got for the green tea by microwave vacuum drying. However, microwave vacuum drying machine has a higher cost so it is not suitable for large amount of commercial or industrial tea process. And microwave drying also show the excellent drying performance not only keep more nutrients but also produce green tea with less astringent taste as the lowest phenol-ammonia ratio among four drying methods. On the other tables, we can clearly see the microwave drying is a high efficiency as 10 times faster than hot air drying methods. Microwave works by emitting wave only works on the water molecular not the whole material so it could save much energy consumption without any energy loss

There is no doubt that industrial microwave is a new and efficient drying solution for commercial green tea process. So far, MAX Industrial Microwave system is widely used for green tea fixation and drying purpose. We also receive lots of good feedback like less maintenance, simple control, small footprint, longer lifespan and good after sale service etc.

Except green tea fixation and drying application, MAX Industrial microwave also can dry black tea, CTC black tea, white tea, oolong tea, yellow tea, Chamomile, flower tea, honeysuckle, Echinacea, Lemon ginger tea and Japan “Sencha”.