Bringing consciousness to tasting, not just in the sensory experience of the mouth or intellect, but also in the body. Sometimes these approaches face each other: the very Western sommelier side, especially French, and the very experiential Chinese approach.
Buddies Cafe in Ooty. This cafe is the largest tea room in India, which features over 220 varieties of tea: artisanal and hand-crafted single-origin teas, orthodox blends, tisanes, and CTC dust. When I first entered the cafe, Nirmal Raj stood next to a wall of transparent glass tea canisters and opened them enthusiastically to allow customers to inhale as he spoke animatedly about each tea. After leaving my non-heated hostel, I chanced upon the cafe, searching for a warmer place to write from. As a shoestring budget backpacker, I had traveled to the Nilgiris tea-growing region on an overnight bus from Bengaluru, India, and soon found myself returning daily to Buddies Cafe.
Coming up with the (right?) words
When I do a tea tasting with customers or friends, I often give them our tasting wheel to help them figure out words to best describe their experiences. It is a bit more fun than using a rating scale. If you have ever been to a tasting, you’ve probably seen something like this before. The same words can describe flavour for almost anything you are tasting.
It is important to keep in mind that many flavors are actually composed of the same chemical compounds. A great example is isoamyl acetate. For some, this organic compound can taste like bananas, whereas for others, it has a distinct pear flavor. Another is benzaldehyde. This organic compound smells and tastes like peaches, cherries, apricots, or almonds, depending on the chemical compound experienced on your tongue. Two tasters can taste these compounds differently. My friend Phil, who wrote Chapter 21 on tea cocktails, is a chemist who works as a distiller. He explained this to me one day at a whiskey tasting when I could swear that I tasted pear when my colleague said he tasted bananas. Though I, to this day, say that I was right, we both tasted what we tasted, and neither of us was wrong.
Again, it is helpful to learn words that best describe your tasting experience—but it’s important to remember to enjoy the experience and worry less about sounding like an expert.
This book is a sensual delight: in it, you learn to explore tea using your senses, including sight, smell, taste, and even sound. Dr. Lovelace describes experiments you can try at home with tea using budget-friendly materials. This is a fascinating journey into the science of tea you can take without leaving home.
“Down-chain tasting invites creative adventures into language and experience that is independent of a single lexicon. The focus is on concrete references to scents and aromas but abstract descriptors that personify overall quality are effective. Of course, your words have to describe something that touches on a shared experience — otherwise, it’s useless.”
My introduction to tea was unspoken and visceral. Humble mugs of the strong, milked ‘builder’s tea’ of my youth in the North of England still fill me with nostalgic pleasure whenever I’m in the U.K. My body chemistry has never been without the magic nectar. – Kevin Gascoyne
Tasting Qualities: The Past and the Future of Tea by Sarah Besky manages to easily deconstruct and demystify the space between the plantation and the cup of tea.
What would rhyme have to do with a tea’s aftertaste? To understand the many layers of this play on words, it is important to know that Chinese singing and by extension Chinese poetry have a Yang (masculine) and Yin (feminine) rhyme system.
Wang Hai tea is a pre-Qingming green tea that is grown on Mount Tiantai in China’s Zhejiang Province.
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Teatime allows us to slow down and savor life – and what better way to savor life than by escaping with a good book? Put on the kettle and nestle into your favorite chair to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a romantic read. These tea romances explore many relationships: romantic, friend, family, and even our relationship with ourselves.
A lack of infrastructure, a lack of capital, natural disasters, a pandemic, and a very tough competitor at the border – are the challenges faced by Nepal growers. The Nepal Tea and Coffee Development Board report that very few (3,244) of the three million employed in Nepal’s tea industry work full-time. Seventy-four percent of temporary workers are women, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. There are 18,180 small farm owners, in stark contrast to India’s vast tea plantations and the social complexity of such systems. The farmers can either process the tea themselves or sell the raw leaves to factories.
Experiencing the taste of tea and then describing that experience in spoken and written language is an art and a science, dependent on both inspiration and a lot of hard work. Professional tasters discuss some of the key questions about their craft.
Yiwu big tree puer has coarse stems and apparent long black strips. These big, slow-growing trees grow with minimal human […]