PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide stable beverages especially green tea beverages decreased in roughness and rough tastes as much as possible, keeping refresh aftertaste indispensable to the green tea beverage, having food texture, body and taste inherent to the green tea, and causing no sedimentation nor turbidness even in a long term storage.SOLUTION: A production method of tea beverage includes: a grinding step of grinding with a stone mill a tea leaf raw material to be a size of 1-100 &mum particle size so as to obtain a powdered tea an ultrafine grinding step of adding 10-30 times water to the powdered tea and performing ultrafine grinding treatment to increase the rate of particles having &le1 &mum particle size with a high pressure homogenizer at &ge100 kg/cm2 pressure so as to obtain an ultrafine ground tealeaf suspension a blending step of blending the ultrafine ground tealeaf suspension to a tea extract solution at a ratio of the ultrafine ground tealeaf suspension:the tea extract solution=1:1-10 (weight ratio) so as to obtain the suspension and a coarse particle removing step of removing &ge50% particles having &ge1 &mum particle size in the suspension by centrifugation so as to obtain the tea beverage.COPYRIGHT: (C)2011,JPO&INPIT【課題】ざらつき、雑味が極力少なく緑茶飲料に不可欠なすっきりした後味を保持し、緑茶本来の食感、コク、味わいを有し、かつ長期保管においても沈殿や濁りの発生しない安定な飲料、特に緑茶飲料を提供する。【解決手段】茶葉原料を粒子径が1~100μmの大きさになるまで石臼で粉砕して粉末茶を得る粉砕工程、前記粉末茶に10~30倍量の水を加えて圧力100kg/cm2以上で高圧ホモジナイザーにより粒子径が1μm以下の粒子の割合を増加させるように超微粉砕処理を行って超微粉砕茶葉懸濁液を得る超微粉砕工程、前記超微粉砕茶葉懸濁液を茶抽出液に、超微粉砕茶葉懸濁液:茶抽出液=1:1~10(重量比)の割合で配合して懸濁液を得る配合工程、前記懸濁液中の粒子径1μm以上の粒子の50%以上を遠心分離により除去して茶飲料を得る粗粒子除去工程を有する茶飲料の製造方法。【選択図】図1
