Early Quality Determination of Oolong Tea

Early determination of tea quality has been a concern in tea breeding, as it constitutes an important factor in the long tea breeding process.The quality of Oolong tea is generally determined by sensory evaluation with the traditional small-sampling procedure.However, the method requires a considerable amount of fresh leaves from an individual plant with 7-8 years of pre-cultivation.In this study, a micro-sampling method was used.It required only 100-150 g of fresh leaves from a 3 to 4-year-old plant.The sensory evaluation on aroma, taste and over-all quality of the tea samples collected using this new method indicated that they were basically consistent with those obtained by the traditional small-sampling methodology.It suggested that the newly developed micro-sampling procedure could be satisfactorily used for early quality determination of the tea.By adopting this new method, it was conceivably that the workload, breeding period, land use and potential for errors could be drastically reduced for the tea breeding operation.