The Effect of Storage Period and Natural Additive Qare-Qat on Iranian Tea (Camellia sinensis) Quality

Iranian tea industry problems caused to related section damage. Low quality of Iranian black tea and change in sense of consumers taste is one of the reasons. It is produced various teas to attract of consumer opinion. Permissible additives using is not usual in Iranian tea industry (before packaging). One of the natural additives of black tea (i. e. Qare-Qat) evaluated in this experiment. The experiment carried out by using a Split-Plot with two factors in three replications. Storage period was distributed in four levels (0، 2، 4 and 6 months) in main plots and added Qare-Qat fruit amount in subplots in four levels (0، 5%، 10% and 15%). Qualitative traits of tea including organoleptical tests (as made tea apparent، color، perfume، and flavor of tea beverage) and chemical tests (as measuring of theaflavin (TF)، thearubigin (TR)، total color (TC) and brightness (B) of tea) studied. Chemical tests results showed that «Tea + 5 and 10 percent Qare-Qat fruits» treatment has more TF، B and TF/TR ratio than control (pure tea) and this difference was significance in 1% level. However، taste tests did not revealed significance difference between control and tea + Qare-Qat blends.