The first step of processing GT is called green-killing (“Shaqing”
in Chinese), which is also the key process (Diagram 1). Green
killing refers to quick application of heat, either with steam, or by
parching in hot pans, to halt oxidation and fix most of the chemical
constituents of the tea leaves (Lu & Shen, 2012; Zhou et al., 2013).
As shown in Table 2, it was found that EGCG (54.06 mg/g) and CAF
(34.86 mg/g) were the two most abundant of the ten components
in GT, and in fact GT possessed the most abundant EGCG and CAF of
all the other types of tea. This finding may correlate with the short
processing period of GT, and the degradation of catechins in tea was
inhibited.