PEMBUATAN TEH RENDAH KAFEIN MELALUI PROSES EKSTRAKSI DENGAN PELARUT ETIL ASETAT

Abstract

Tea is one of the most popular beverages having a great beneficial effect on human health. This is because of the tea contains a lot of worthy compounds consist of polyphenol, theophiline, flavoniod/methylxanthine, tannin, vitamin C and E, catechin, and some mineral such as Zn, Se, Mo, Ge, Mg. However, tea also contains an undesirable compound called caffeine. This compound can cause some undesirable reactions such as insomnia, nervous, delirium, tachycardia, extra systole, respiratory increase, tremor, and dieresis. In order to reduce negative effect of caffeine, general method have been applied for reducing caffeine content by using solvent extraction and supercritical extraction with CO2. This research was focused on production of low caffeine content tea using extraction with ethyl acetate as solvent. Specifically, this research was conducted in order to study the effect of temperature and time on reduction of caffeine content to obtain optimum condition of production of low caffeine content tea, to carried out organoleptic test to check the flavor of low caffeine content tea, and to make a mathematical modeling for extraction of caffeine from tea. Experimental works were executed in 10 runs with operation time (63,4 – 176,6 minutes) and temperature (45,8 - 74,1 °C ) as the independent variable. High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) was used to analyze the caffeine content. The data resulted was processed using Response Surface Methodology to obtain mathematical model and optimum operating condition. The experiment resulted tea with caffeine content reduction of 10,4 - 40,1 % (2,8 – 10,9 mg/g tea). The product is tea with caffeine content of 1,63 – 2,44 %. The optimum operating condition obtained from RSM are temperature 58,5 °C, time 98,5 minutes, and caffeine content reduction 40,3 %. Organoleptic test show that the extraction process doesn’t have effect on the tea flavor.