Geographical origin identification of pure Sri Lanka tea infusions with electronic nose, electronic tongue and sensory profile analysis

Tea quality used to be traditionally evaluated by sensory panels. Their expertise is considerably better than that of the average consumers. However, there can be definite subjectivity in the judgment of sensory panels. A new direction is advanced sensory study that integrates sensory assessment with instrumental evaluation. The aim of this paper is to distinguish five Sri Lanka black teas from plantations of different geographical origins. From the tea samples, infusions were prepared with standard procedure. Three different test methods were applied: electronic nose, electronic tongue and sensory assessment. In the case of the electronic nose only the volatile components were evaluated. The Alpha Astree II potentiometric electronic tongue analyzed the liquid phase, while in the sensory profiling all perceptible attributes were tested. Data were analyzed with principle component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and in the case of sensory analysis with one-way ANOVA. The partial least square regression (PLS) was used to estimate the sensory attributes. As a final result, we found that LDA maps show the quality differences of teas grown at different altitudes and geographical location of growing regions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.