Tea cream is also known as colloidal precipitate. In accordance with the classical theory of lyophobic colloids (Verwey and Overbeek 1948), the electrostatic repulsion between the charged droplet surfaces protects the droplets from coagulation. However, at high tea cream phase
volumes, the phenomenon of phase inversion with a dilute phase dispersed into a continuous cream phase was also found by Bee et al. (1987). Penders et al. (1998) showed that in the concentrated region of the miscibility gap (>2%w/w), demixing (spinodal decomposition) was the predom-inant mechanism of cream formation, and the (narrow) metastable region of the miscibility gap was in general difficult to access even at low concentrations of tea and small temperature quench depths. The rheological behavior of a solid–liquid dispersion depends on the characteristics
of the continuous phase (the solvent or serum), the dispersed phase (the particle), and the interactions between them. However, there was lack of study on tea cream formation and the stability of tea concentrate, especially green tea concentrate.