Abstract: It is reported that tea has many medical functions. However, consumers prefer decaffeinated tea and tea products due to caffeine’s negative disadvantageous. Decaffeination is realized by different methods, including the traditional methods such as water decaffeination, solvent extraction, adsorption separating and supercritical carbon dioxide extraction. The recent developmental microbial and enzymatic degradation and breeding low caffeine tea varieties are also developed for removal of caffeine. The investigation on tea decaffeination was reviewed, and the feasibility was discussed in this paper. The techniques of water decaffeination combined with adsorption separating, microbial and enzymatic degradation as well as low caffeine tea breeding were regarded as the main developmental direction of tea decaffeination by the authors.

Key words: tea, decaffeination, technique, review