In China, tea beverages are primarily packaged in PET plastic bottles. The beverage production line integrates rinsing, filling, and capping functions into a single unit, making it ideal for producing mineral water, distilled water, and purified water. The entire machine is made of high-quality stainless steel, offering corrosion resistance and easy cleaning.
Tea leaves are extracted at appropriate temperatures and undergo high-speed centrifugation to obtain a clear, transparent tea beverage. This is then sterilized using ultra-high temperature (UHT) processing before being filled and sealed on the production line to create the final packaged tea beverage.
Relevant experts believe that compared to cans and glass bottles, PET bottles offer advantages such as light weight, low cost, convenient drinking, and transparent walls, allowing the product to be clearly visible and attract attention. Furthermore, PET bottles are easy to process. Different products can incorporate various color masterbatches, giving the product unique colors. For instance, adding green can influence consumer psychology, enhance product stability, and help prevent oxidation.
However, the requirements for filling mineral water differ from those for filling cola or tea beverages. Cola, being a carbonated drink, requires PET bottles that prevent CO2 from escaping and O2 from entering. Ordinary PET bottles have some drawbacks in terms of acid/alkali resistance and heat resistance. At temperatures above 60°C, the neck can shrink, soften, reduce in volume, and become deformed. The development of heat-resistant PET bottles in the early 1990s improved the bottle’s heat resistance to around 95°C, enabling hot filling of tea beverages at 85°C–90°C. Many domestic beverage producers, such as Master Kong, utilize this technology and equipment.
When using PET bottles as packaging containers for tea beverages, three key technologies must be addressed to prevent microbial spoilage. To prevent tea beverage deterioration, a semi-aseptic packaging method must be adopted. After UHT sterilization, the tea beverage is hot-filled and sealed in a clean room, then cooled over a period to form the final product.
- Inhibitory Effect of Tea Polyphenols: Tea polyphenols inhibit microbial growth, helping to prevent contamination of the tea.
- Preventing Tea Sediment/Haze: Tea haze is a major issue in black tea beverage production that needs to be resolved. Solutions should focus on water quality, tea raw materials, extraction processes, and the application of enzymes.
- Aseptic Packaging Technology: This represented a major technological innovation in tea beverage production around 1990. Semi-aseptic filling technology relies on the premise that tea beverages are nutrient-deficient (making it hard to meet microbial nutritional needs) coupled with the antibacterial effect of tea polyphenols. Therefore, using the hot-fill method for PET-bottled tea beverages is very challenging for nutrient-rich milk teas, blended teas with low tea polyphenol content, and barley teas that contain no tea polyphenols at all.
For non-carbonated beverages, the traditional production process involves placing preheated or cooled product into bottles/cans, sealing them, and then applying pasteurization or high-temperature sterilization according to a specific sterilization formula, followed by cooling and drying to produce the final product. Alternatively, the product itself is first sterilized at high temperature, then filled at temperatures between 80°C–95°C, utilizing the residual heat of the product after sealing to sterilize the inner walls of the bottle and the cap.
In 1987, the production volume of hot-filled beverages in Japan surpassed that of cold-filled beverages.
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