Quality Tea Processing for Small Growers and Instrumentation

Abstract

Small tea growers have a specific requirement of processing of low volumes of green leaf and yet achieving reasonable quality of the end-product while remaining competitive in the global market. Due to small tea growing areas, it becomes economically unviable for small tea growers to go with conventional tea processing machineries to perform withering, rolling, fermentation and drying operations. This usually forces them to go for selling of leaf to larger tea gardens often depriving them of fetching a good price. The bought leaf factories too find problem in achieving consistency in the quality of made tea due to heterogeneous leaf coming from various small tea growers. One, therefore, loses at both the ends when viewed from a macroscopic angle. The present paper highlights the innovative design of environmentally controlled manufacturing machine having integrated processing units for withering, rolling/CTC, fermentation and drying operations. Due to its modular design, one can scale it up or down as per specific leaf processing requirements. The paper also described advanced sensing techniques and instrumentation based thereupon for monitoring of key parameters of green leaf/made tea which are applicable to both small and large tea growers. Such gadgets are quite handy in assessing the quality aspects at various stages of tea manufacturing