Drying is important stage in tea manufacturing, because many volatile compounds are formed, transformed, or lost. The effect of different drying temperatures on the volatile composition of black tea has been investigated the first time. Temperature, grade, and temperature–grade interaction showed significant (p < .05) effect on volatile compounds. Aldehydes had the highest share among the volatile compound groups. On average, trans‐2‐hexenal was the most abundant with 14.71% while, linalool was the least abundant with 0.43%. Decanal and 1‐pentene‐3‐one showed no significant (p < .05) difference depending on neither temperature nor grade. Correlation with increasing temperature, 2‐furaldehyde was the strongest positive, whilst trans‐2‐hexenal was the strongest negative (p < .01). Linalool and subsequent volatile flavor compounds (VCF) were grouped as VFC II, volatiles before linalool were grouped as VFC I and also VFC II/VFC I was accepted as flavor index. The highest flavor index value was obtained as 0.214.
Practical applications
Black tea has a very important place in Turkish culture and it is preferred because of its unique taste. Although the volatile components are small in quantity, it is effective on the flavor of a good tea. In this study, teas graded according to particle size were dried at different temperatures and the change in volatile compounds was investigated. Volatile compounds were extracted by solid phase microextraction (SPME) method and detected by GC–MS. In addition, the flavor index for tea was formed by considering the desired and undesirable volatile components. It can be said that the drying temperature on the volatile components is more effective than the grading.