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The Appropriate Way to Serve Butterfly Pea Flower Drink at Home

Article  in  ICONIET PROCEEDING · February 2019

DOI: 10.33555/iconiet.v2i2.24

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology,
30-31 October 2018, BSD City, Indonesia,
ISSN: 2477-1538

The Appropriate Way to Serve Butterfly Pea

Flower Drink at Home
Abdullah Muzi Marpaunga*, Samuel Chianga
a
Food Technology Department Swiss German University, Indonesia
*bangmuzi@yahoo.com

Abstract: This study conducted to find the appropriate way to serve butterfly pea flower drink
at home. The colorless, red, purple, and green transparent glass and colorless glass covered by
aluminum foil used to contain four grams butterfly pea petal. A 250 ml of boiling water poured
to the glass to soak the petal for 60 minutes. The color intensity and total anthocyanin of the
liquid measured every five minutes. The regression slope analysis exhibited that light gave no
significant decrease in color intensity and total anthocyanin. About 83% of color and
anthocyanin extracted within 5 minutes. There was no significant increase of the color and
anthocyanin after 30 minutes. Therefore, the maceration of butterfly pea flower in boiling water
for five minutes was appropriate to serve the drink. Furthermore, to reach the maximum color
and anthocyanin content the 30 minutes maceration is needed. The maximum anthocyanin
content of the drink was 19.57 ± 1.16 mg/l or equal to 1.22 ± 0.07 mg per gram fresh petal.

Keywords: anthocyanins, butterfly pea

1. Introduction
Butterfly pea (Clitoria ternatea L.) is a flowering ornamental plant that relatively easy to cultivate. The
flowers have started to appear at the age of 4 to 6 weeks. At suitable conditions, the plant continue to
flower every day for several years. Butterfly pea flower has been recognized as a potential source of
anthocyanin called ternatins (Terahara et al., 1990). There are 9 types of ternatin in fully-opened
butterfly pea flower (Kazuma et al., 2003). They are reported to have several health benefits such as
antioxidant (Rao et al., 2009), antidiabetic and hypolipidemic (Daisy & Rajathi, 2009),
anti-inflammation (Mukherjee et al., 2008) and anticancer (Morris, 2009).
Anthocyanins are water soluble bioactive compound that stored in vacuole of the plant cell.
Heat is usually needed to release the anthocyanins from vacuole. However, anthocyanins are relatively
unstable. They are reported degraded due to the heat exposure during processing like extraction,
pasteurization, sterilization, and blanching (Sadilova et al., 2009; Cisse et al., 2011). Other than heat,
the stability of anthocyanins also affected by light, pH, oxygen, and enzyme (Patras et al., 2010). In
general, anthocyanins exhibit higher stability when kept in the absence of light (Cavalcanti et al., 2011).
The preparation of butterfly pea flower drink at home is relatively easy, i.e., by soaking the
fresh petal in boiling water for several minutes and separate the solid residue from the liquid. However,
there was no report describing the effect of heat during the maceration to the anthocyanin content of the
drink. Secondly, related to the sensitivity of anthocyanins to light, there was no study to disclose the
effect of different color of the glass to the anthocyanin content of the drink.

2. Methodology
Materials
The fresh fully-open butterfly flower harvested from a garden in South Tangerang, Banten, Indonesia.
The buffer solution pH 1 (potassium chloride and hydrochloric acid) was obtained from Merck®
(Germany).

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology,
30-31 October 2018, BSD City, Indonesia,
ISSN: 2477-1538

2.1. Maceration
Each four grams of fresh petal added to colorless, red, purple, and green transparent glass and colorless
glass wrapped with aluminum foil. The 250 ml of boiling distilled water poured into each glass, then the
glass immediately covered by a cup cover. The maceration time was 60 minutes in room temperature.
The color intensity (CI) and total anthocyanin (TA) of the liquid measured every 5 minutes by a UV-Vis
Spectrophotometer (Genesys 10uv Thermo Electron Corporation, USA).
The CI was determined as (Aλmax – A700) x DF (Cisse et al., 2011). The TA was evaluated d
based on the single pH method (Lee et al., 2005). The 0.5 ml extract adjusted with buffer solution pH
1.0 and the absorbance at λmax measured. The TA obtained by (A × MW × DF × 1000)/(ε × l). MW was
molecular weight of cyanidin-3-glucoside (449.2 g/mol), DF was a dilution factor, ε was molar
absorptivity (26 900), and l is the cuvette width.
2.2. Statistical Analyses
The statistical analyses involved were trend analyses (Pearson’s correlation, regression analysis and
slope test) (Microsoft Excel® 2010 software, Microsoft Corporation). The significant level of all
analyses was α= 0.05.

3. Results and Discussion

3.1. Color intensity and Total Anthocyanin
The color intensity and total anthocyanin of the extracts made by soaking boiling water to fresh
butterfly pea flower in the various color of glass are shown in Figure 1. The regression slope test
showed that the color of glass gave no significant difference (p-value > 0.05) in the rate of color
intensity and total anthocyanin increase during maceration. Hence, the use of dark or opaque glass as
the container to extract the ternatins from butterfly pea flower at home was unnecessary. This was in
alignment to the report that ternatins are amongst the most stable anthocyanin (Terahara, Saito, Honda,
Toki, & Osajima, 1990). The high stability of ternatins was due to the intramolecular copigmentation
configured by a hydrophobic interaction between the aromatic acids and anthocyanin chromophore
(Yoshida et al., 2009).

1.4 a 25.0 b

1.2
Color Intensity (AU)

Total Anthocyanin (mg/L)

20.0
1.0

0.8 15.0

0.6
10.0
0.4
5.0
0.2

0.0 0.0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60
Time (min) Time (min)
Colorless Red Purple Green Alu-fo

Figure 1. Color intensity and total anthocyanin of butterfly pea flower extract during maceration
in various glass color.

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology,
30-31 October 2018, BSD City, Indonesia,
ISSN: 2477-1538

There was a very strong correlation between the color intensity and total anthocyanin (R 2 =
0.96). The total anthocyanin content (mg/l) during maceration for 5 to 60 minutes could be
appropriately predicted by 14.18 x color intensity + 4.90.
3.2. Three Phases of Color and Anthocyanin Increase During Maceration
In this research, four grams of butterfly pea petal soaked in 250 ml boiling water. The amount was about
equal to 20 pieces of the fresh petal. During maceration, there were three phases of the color intensity
and anthocyanin increase in the extract (Figure 2). The first phase occurred between 0 to 5 minutes of

100
stationary stage

80
% CI and TA

60

40

20

0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Maceration time (minute)

Figure 2. Color intensity and total anthocyanin of butterfly pea flower extract during
maceration in various glass color.

maceration. At this phase there were rapid increase of color intensity and total anthocyanin. In average,
83% of color intensity and total anthocyanin gained during this stage. This percentage was about equal
to 16.31 ± 0.84 mg anthocyanin per liter or 4.1 mg anthocyanin per 250 ml. The high percentage of
color and anthocyanin extracted indicated that the cell wall of butterfly pea flower was relatively easy to
destructed. At the second phase (5 minutes to 30 minutes), there were slight increases of color intensity
and total anthocyanin. The increase rate of color intensity and total anthocyanin in this phase were
0.0013 absorbance unit (AU) per minute and 0.1 mg/l per minute, respectively. The approximate total
anthocyanin content at the end of the second phase was 19.57 ± 1.16 mg/l or 4.89 mg/250 ml. The
anthocyanin content came from the extraction of 4 grams fresh butterfly pea petal with 250 ml water.
Hence, the anthocyanin content per gram of fresh petal was 1.22 ± 0.07 mg.
The recommended daily intake of anthocyanins has not been established yet. However, China
has currently defined a specific proposed level of 50 mg/day (Wallace & Giusti, 2015). Therefore, the
anthocyanin content of the butterfly pea flower extract in a glass after 30 minutes was about 10% of the
proposed level. The third phase was the stationary phase that began after 30 minutes to 60 minutes of
maceration. At this phase there was no significant color or anthocyanin increase (coefficient of
determination R2 < 0.35 and p-Value > 0.05).

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology,
30-31 October 2018, BSD City, Indonesia,
ISSN: 2477-1538

4. Conclusions
The preparation of butterfly pea flower drink by soaking the petal in boiling water for 5 minutes was
appropriate. The maximum anthocyanin content achieved by extending the maceration until 30
minutes. The use of opaque or dark glass as the container for the maceration was not needed. During 60
minutes of maceration, there was no significant effect of the light to the anthocyanin content.

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