How Did You Develop Your Sense of Tea Flavors and Aromas?

combined tasting can highlight subtle differences, including flavor aspects

It's not uncommon for Reddit discussions to raise interesting starting points on tea themes, as in this case, considering how you can develop a sense of tea flavors.  That's not the most natural way to frame that set of ideas, related to how I see it, but it works, since it's functionally equivalent.  That post is here.

I guess it's not really a secret how my IRL status links to that Reddit profile, so this is what I commented (left in the original cut and paste formatting, which is extra janky, but that also works):

 

It's an interesting prior question if analytically identifying distinct flavors enhances the tea drinking experience, or if it's irrelevant instead. 

Moving on to the actual question, it just takes practice. Over a long period of time with lots of exposure, and focus on this theme, it will become easier to identify both general ranges of flavors and distinct flavor inputs. One tool that can help with this is a flavor wheel. It won't help initially, because you need the developed skill to go with it, but separating flavors into ranges does work better, and it helps having an idea of what you might be experiencing. It's this kind of thing (from here):

Note that some flavor you pick up with your tongue, often referred to as tastes (although these terms are used loosely in common usage): salt, sweetness, bitterness, sourness, umami (savory range). These others are sensed by your rear nasal passages, so they tend to be referred to as aromas.

This subject just keeps going. Sweetness isn't really identified by the typical sensation of carbohydrate range, of sugars, so you are really sensing other taste range that you associate with that same experience, or that mimic it (two different things). Astringency is a mouthfeel aspect, that is completely separate from this, but that is often confused with the experience of bitterness, or that could be adjacent to it. Sometimes a lack of one aspect range can seem to affect how you experience others, or an excess of one could have a different but comparable effect.

In practice there will always be flavors you just aren't familiar with, like those of a broad range of flowers (for many), or for obscure spices (eg. identifying the different incense spices). Then beyond that there is a broad range of what you've already experience that's going to be hard to associate, even though in a loose sense the flavor is familiar. Malt works as an example. Most of us have tried Ovaltine, or malted milk shakes, but it can be tricky identifying that flavor as what you are experience. Malty flavor in Assam black tea is related but it's something else, so we can use flavor concepts to cover a range of related tastes. Flavors perceived as negative can come across differently, or a base flavor range context including less pleasant flavors can steer you to noticing certain range (eg. even limited sourness might steer you to identifying musty or mineral flavors, while perceived sweetness might cause you to "look for" fruit or other positive range).

In actual practice there are a few things you can do. You can eat before tasting tea, but it should be neutral food, and you should eat it an hour or so before the tea. You can then still eat during tea tasting, but it should be even more neutral food, maybe something like nuts, a cracker, or croissant, to avoid adjusting sense of taste. It would be better to never smoke, and to avoid other harsh food or other flavor experience, all of the time. You can use water to "cleanse" your palate between tasting rounds, or even infusions of the same tea. Some flavor experience can build up in a positive way, or I suppose a negative way, but it can help resetting taste to get a clearer image of it. It's best to give yourself a lot of time and mental space. It takes a lot longer than it seems that it might. Sure, you can gulp a few swallows of a mug of tea and sense some flavors, but it helps to sip and slurp over an extended time, to really pause to consider what the experience is, what the constituent parts are.

Other inputs can matter more than it seems that they would. If there's potpurri in the room that's not going to help at all. Even a very dry environment can throw off the experience. People's sensations vary over time, maybe with different times of the day, or can vary from day to day. One part of the ongoing shift in form of perception is about noticing how all of that works for you.

That's a lot of it.  Ordinarily I'd unpack that first part more, whether or not an analytical approach that isolates and defines flavor aspects seems helpful, but leaving it open doesn't skip much.  People would see that differently, and I have mixed feelings about it myself.  I don't think that much gets lost, not moving on to a more analytical interpretation, and to the extent that kind of review helps it might make more difference beyond flavor range.  

It seems that as you try to do more with comparing teas you end up isolating aspects more and more, but the focus on the flavor list interpretation may not be as helpful or functional as identifying other ranges of strengths and weakness.  Typical positive range includes intensity, complexity, body / feel, aftertaste expression, refinement (an especially vague emergent and higher level range), sweetness level, balance, and so on.  

Negative aspects, flaws, or other limitations can take on lots of forms.  Sourness is a good example of what people typically hope not to experience, although there are exceptions, some fermented teas that are supposed to include a little (like a Japanese fermented goishi cha).  Some mineral flavor range can be especially positive, and other scope quite unpleasant.  A bit of "cement block" taste might be in the middle, but leaning towards less positive.  A tea as tasting like an ash tray would usually be negative, and that can come up.  Some of those positive aspects missing or seeming out of balance can represent flaws (eg. sweetness level seeming off, or feel being thin).

In some online product descriptions--a minor subset of all of them, since it's rare--a lengthy list of flavors can seem improbable.  Complex teas can express a lot, and flavors can evolve across rounds, but when a dozen flavors are described as primary that's likely to be exaggeration.  Don Mei come to mind; he talks like that.  But some people really could free-associate a lot of valid feedback about the experience; maybe he is just doing that, a lot of the time, and isn't even clear himself on when it bridges over to less justified marketing spin.

And this circles back to whether or not it's positive or helpful to describe aspects.  If you are struggling to place 3 or 4 primary flavors then it might be interesting to develop a better aptitude for making such connections.  But once you pick up that ability maybe it would make sense to keep going, to see how far it can go, and that might become a valued part of your normal tea experience.  Or really the "raw experience" shouldn't change, with less labels placed on parts of that experience, so passing on all of it could also make sense.

That writing never unpacked how the tea wheel can help with this.  It may be easier earlier on to get a more vague sense of a general flavor scope range, for example seeing flavors as vegetal or floral, without it being easy to narrow that to specifics.  Using the flavor wheel can help support that kind of a two-stage interpretive approach, and can help with suggestions about the finer distinctions.  

I remember once struggling to place a flavor in winter oolong version, something warm and rich, that was unfamiliar to me, within tea experience.  It turned out to be malt, or more specifically the range of malt found in Ovaltine or malted milk balls (or milkshakes), versus the drier, edgier malt expressed in Assam black tea.  A tea wheel didn't help me then, but it could have.  Instead it just eventually came to mind.

The photo caption at the start mentioned that combined tastings might help.  But it's hard to say how.  That really works better to highlight differences, more than specific aspects.  If one version is much fuller in feel that will be quite clear, for example.  Differences in relative sweetness level stands out.  Something like greater flavor complexity, more going on for diversity of aspects, would also stand out, but it wouldn't necessarily help with identifying one flavor aspect version.  

It's drifting off topic a bit, but something also gets lost in using this approach.  You wouldn't notice the "cha qi" or body feel effect from just one version, which I don't tend to pick up on well anyway.  And a flavor experience can seem to build over time, as you drink round after round, in a form beyond simple transitioning, changes to aspects.  Switching between two versions would offset that.

Practice would make the most difference, trying lots of teas, and paying attention to them.  It's hard to describe what that entails.  It helps to set aside time and attention space, to spend a half an hour or an hour just drinking a tea.  Relatively pleasant but still neutral outdoor exposure can be nice for that; you don't need to be isolated in a low-stimulus empty room. 

he's not in the picture; this is from another day

As I type this, on an apartment balcony in Honolulu, a small bird with a green head stops by on the nearby evergreen tree to chatter on about something.  I suppose he is costing me focus, but in a pleasant sense.  It's nothing like watching a 45 minute Youtube video, where I'm immersed in a screen.  For me I also avoid music in the background; it's just one more layer of stimulus to tune out.

my very patient tea drinking companions back in Bangkok, usually caught up in exploring

that space.  having tea with breakfast doesn't help, but eating somewhat neutral foods first is fine.

Tea flavor / aroma wheels reconsidered (with a Spanish version)

Early on in my blog history I considered the use of tea flavor or aroma wheels in tea tasting.  My main critique of those related to noticing that the flavor or aroma examples were all from temperate climate or "Western" examples, when that doesn't necessarily reflect a complete range of experienced flavors.

That was back at the end of 2013; what did I know of tasting tea then?  Or now, really.  Some tea reviewers tend to draw on Asian flavor references quite a bit instead (eg. jujube or Chinese date, tropical fruits, herbs more common to Asia or tropical regions), but those are still an exception.

a cool wheel version from a vendor who is no longer active

All the same it's more a starting point reference, a way to break flavor / aroma experience into categories (fruity, floral, earthy, mineral intensive, vegetal, etc.), with examples of what one might experience.  Both of the wheels I cited as an example then contained limited tropical fruit references, to be clear; that one issue wasn't completely one-sided.  It's odd that I'm not seeing bergamot or muscatel on those, now that I think of it.  "Citrus" makes it; maybe it just has to be broken out from that, in the case of the first.

I just ran across a reference of a wheel translated into Spanish by a tea enthusiast and blogger in Mexico, in the "Life Sip by Sip" blog (by Dennis Diaz, a translated version of the Tea Master's original, but as that earlier and unrelated Temple Mountain version shows the forms tend to repeat).  I talked to that blog author three years ago, when working on a post about tea culture in Mexico, but don't remember noticing that.  Or maybe I did; that was three years ago.  I'll add her impression here (automatically translated from a blog post):

Knowing the origin of the tea, infusing it correctly and without haste, as well as drinking it, enjoying the sensations, emotions and feelings that it causes us, leads us to conscious consumption.

When we drink a cup of tea, our senses receive information that is transmitted to the brain in order to be interpreted and translated into unique images about what we are tasting and feelings that, most of the time, are very pleasant.

Regardless of whether you are an expert tea consumer or someone who is just taking their first steps in the exquisite and wonderful world of Camellia Sinensis, the identification of the aromatic notes and the interpretation of these images and feelings generated will enrich the experience.

Maybe it is read [interpreted as?] complicated, but the secret is to be able to look within ourselves for what we feel and remember when having tea...

Limitations and reservations about this approach

I can't settle for myself if it makes a lot of difference, or is even better, to describe the aspects in a tea or not.  I do that in writing reviews, or course, but I enjoy just experiencing a tea without adding any analysis when I'm not reviewing.  Also I tend to appreciate the overall balance of aspects in any given tea, without necessarily focusing on the flavor as a singular main input.  I don't "get" cha qi or body feel aspects to the same extent many describe but a tea that is thin in feel or lacks aftertaste experience range also loses some appeal.

A recurring theme in this blog has been how different people would naturally interpret the same flavors in different ways.  It's hard to pin that down to one clear, representative example.  Another theme I've been noticing (not really related) is how some tea reviewers (bloggers, of course) tend to mention transitions between rounds in teas that sound as if they are really describing a dozen different versions of tea, while others assert that the main flavors remain consistent, with more shift in relative balance than new flavors joining in, with other range continually dropping out.

What to make of all that?  I'm really not sure.  I can't conclude that "it's all subjective," or guess that some people can accurately identify an objectively correct interpretation better.  Maybe it's somewhere in the middle; the patterns really are there, but interpretation plays a significant role.  In one of my favorite posts I asked a few blogger contacts and a tea maker friend for input about how that works out, in this post: "Imagination and subjectivity in tea tasting, with blogger and expert input."

There's probably no need to repeat ideas from there or try to capture patterns described; input on all that varied.  My wine maker friend leaned towards the take that variations in descriptions is not a problem, running counter to what I take to be the more standard general consensus in that field.  But then I took up and quit wine interest a long time ago (and never had got far) maybe that mainstream stance has shifted since.

Input on subjective interpretation from a favorite chocolate blogger in that post was interesting (I've only ever talked to one chocolate blogger; just being weird in that part):


Lisabeth's answer:  Certainly chocolate tasting is subjective to some extent. Everyone tastes food differently, and so will relate the flavours they taste in chocolate to different foods. In the case of Madagascar-origin chocolate, for instance, the chocolate is so clearly fruity that most people will identify that as a flavour in chocolate made from cocoa beans grown in Madagascar. But whether they taste raspberry versus grape or lemon, is a whole other thing. 


That definitely works.  I suppose grape could come across as similar to raspberry in the context of chocolate flavors, and since there really probably are a lot of complex aromatic compounds in the chocolate (as in tea versions) maybe the range of what is being interpreted really is broad.  This subject reminds me of considering what it would take for a machine to be able to "taste" tea in a post.  It does drift into how testing can identify compounds that map to known aromas (or flavors, in one sense of that term), with half that post was about mapping function projects relying on a human taster instead.

a Wikipedia aromatic compounds table; some degree of objective aroma interpretation is justified

Tasting practice and indirect reference of aroma wheels can help.  Scent training kits seem like the next natural step in that progression, but really one might naturally consider what the goals are prior to taking any of those experiential steps.  Or trying out a new approach with no clear goal could still be valid.

the Australian Tea Master's version, from here

Guidance on use of flavor determination in reviews or analysis

In the first draft version of this post it stopped there, with more about why it might not make sense to break out flavors (/ aromas) than about how it could be useful.  If someone wanted to review teas or just write down their own impressions it could make plenty of sense.  I'll add some thoughts on how that might go based on a half dozen years of doing it, broken up by range of what is typically experienced, those standard sections on those wheel.


Floral character:  a lot of tea is floral in flavor, it's just not simple to break that down to distinct flower types, at least for me.  I tend to specify if a floral aspect is light and sweet, like a wildflower, or slightly richer but still light in tone and sweet, like an orchid, or a bit heavier and richer, like lavendar or rose.  Jasmine I'm familiar with since it's around a lot here; that's distinctive.  Beyond that I'm more or less just guessing, or keeping that range of interpretation general.

Fruit:  this can be trickier than it would seem, since this is a really common food range.  Citrus comes up a lot in varying forms, and berry, raisin, and grape can be distinct, but lots of flavors tend to stay a bit vague.  Dried fruit tones are just as common as fresh fruit; dried pear and fresh pear are two different things, for example.  I think I do notice a lot more tropical fruits for eating a lot of them; seems normal enough.  Sun-dried tomato and related savory range can be very pleasant in teas (and I'll get into basic tastes versus aromas in the vegetal part following, since that's really about umami).

Spice:  cinnamon isn't so uncommon, but beyond that these can be hard to identify.  Aromatic spices reminding me of incense tones come up a good bit, or mild, earthy, subtle spices closer to root spices (like ginseng or sassafras).

Vegetal range:  this is probably the easiest range to identify.  Wood tones can vary a lot (cedar versus redwood or fresh hardwood, dark tropical hardwood versus mild coffee or leather tones), but those are all typically placed under "earthy" category instead.  Seaweed can apply almost as a default for Japanese green teas, but really umami is a taste picked up by your tongue, and not a scent based aroma.  It's interesting how the "super-taster" theme would seem to apply more to that scope, since it is usually used in relation to sensor count and sensitivity to tastes versus aromas, and having problems with tastes like bitterness, but the two themes get combined.

Mineral:  this often acts as a base for other flavor range, as I experience it.  It can be very hard to describe because it relates to how different rocks might taste or smell--not necessarily  familiar ground.  I did some desert hiking and rock climbing in earlier life phases and I do end up referring back to that, the smell of different rocks.  Artesian wells (naturally flowing versions) tend to express a specific range that can come up, a sweeter mineral taste.  I sometimes wonder if this isn't more typically a taste versus an aroma, even though it's not exactly within the sodium chloride (table salt) experience of salt range.

Earthy:  it's interesting tasting range outside of food scope, and trying out just about any shu pu'er leads straight there.  Tar or petroleum can actually be pleasant, although fresh asphalt not so much.  Peat can be a more neutral flavor range than it sounds.  Geosmin (like beet or dirt) comes up a lot related to one type of storage conditions environment for aged sheng pu'er.  Forest floor is a useful and common description, but to me it helps to narrow that to a wetter Spring or dryer Fall forest scent range.  That scent would also vary by the type of trees dropping leaves, and descriptions can be more or less detailed and poetic.  I'm not seeing coffee on either of those wheels, and that can come up, either as a light-roasted flavor aspect or closer to the char found in French Roast.

Char / fire:  closer to that last point, some variation of this is primary in many roasted teas, and some that aren't roasted.  Liu Bao tends to taste a little like Chinese barbecue pork, which is in between charcoal, slate, and a savory range flavor.  Tobacco isn't so uncommon, but I tend to think of that as earthy range, not so far from leather.

Sweet:  malt is under "Sweet" in that Temple Mountain wheel (and in the Tea Master's version; that's a good functional approach for that range).  Really malt seems to relate to a soft, sweet flavor like ovaltine or else a more mineral intensive related version in Assam (Indian black tea).


All that is just a starting point; people's experiences and interpretations would vary.   That last category of sweetness, and the umami and mineral cases, bring up the idea that part of flavor experience is taste picked up by the tongue.  It's easy to not notice that distinction in tasting experience, but it can be identified quite clearly by just plugging your nose while tasting.  Trying to review teas with a cold brings up the same theme; all of aroma drops out.

To me sweetness stands out as critical for helping some teas balance properly.  Other flavor range may or may not "work" if a compensating, balanced mix of experience isn't present, and in general more sweetness works better for supporting the rest.  Or maybe that just relates to my own sugar addiction.

Bitterness is an odd special case as tastes go, most common in young (new) sheng pu'er.  Per my own experience almost any presence of that aspect is negative, until you acclimate to it, and then after that it can be perceived as positive.  Experience would definitely vary tied to personal subjective preference related to that, even more so than for any other aspect range, even though it's really all a bit subjective.

One last point:  if I keep saying that taste / flavor / overall effect preferences are subjective why does it continually come up that reviews or descriptions are presented as objective?  I think there are multiple parts to that.

Common convention could lead to a form of objectivity; shared subjective agreement.  I just went through a long discussion of how Dan Cong versions are most typically lightly oxidized (relatively speaking, in relation to other oolong range), and low to medium level roasted, less so than Wuyi Yancha versions tend to be, because that's widely regarded as an optimum for the tea type potential.  I'll skip the rest of that discussion and leave off here as if that's actually made the point it barely brings up: a 'best" range can be established by convention.

Trueness-to-type is really related but slightly different; matching a style for a specific tea version and positive aspects for that type isn't exactly about personal likes, or those shared by a group.  As an example, high mountain Taiwanese oolong really should be intense in flavor, with pronounced floral range and underlying mineral (a specific form of that), rich in feel, with an extended aftertaste experience.  Someone might love or not like creaminess comparable to milk or butter in Jin Xuan (cultivar) based versions, but it's typical for that tea plant type.

Neither of these scopes are going to be clear based on just trying a single tea; identifying them would require exposure to group norms (in the first case) or other tea-type examples regarded as ideal versions.  Individual preferences can still vary in any number of ways but both these contexts set up groundwork for more objective forms of interpretation.

Postscript addition, related to coffee:

Peter Jones, a manager at the Boulder Trident Bookesellers and Cafe (coffee and tea shop), and a tea and coffee enthusiast, mentioned how this relates to coffee tasting and terminology development in a Facebook group post comment.  He only scratched the surface there, but as one might expect coffee is a bit further ahead related to use of standard terminology, tasting approach, tasting process documentation, etc.  Wine tasting surely is further along too; tea enthusiasts and professionals get it that some parts of the tea tradition are very old and developed and others, the more Western-facing aspects, are younger, still being worked out.

I won't run through a long tangent about coffee tasting here, or how that related background goes.  I'll mention an interesting article on that (A Guide to the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel), and include an image of a more recent version of one, what I take to be the current standard version:

According to a Specialty Coffee Association background reference use of images of that wheel is open but also restricted:

The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel by SCA and WCR (©2016) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 


Anyway, that file version was from here, with a little more background in that article.  The previous wheel version, discussed in that guide to wheel use article cited earlier, included a separate wheel that added a second complete version covering common flaws in coffee.  Just great! 

There's no short take on how these references are more developed and functional than the tea versions; it seems a terribly long and involved subject.  This World Coffee Research link (the other organization that developed that new version) leads to more background, if it is of interest.  Or this SCA article says just a little about use, which might be general enough that it's still of interest to people tasting other things, like wine, or tea.

Tea flavor wheels, temperate climate bias

I've ran across a few versions of tea flavor wheels since getting into tea.  These are great for identifying a number of different related flavors, to help with guiding palate development for separating out the flavors in different teas.

Personally I've faced a few hurdles with this.  With practice ordinary flavors aren't so difficult to identify, although at first they sort of are (grass, spices, floral components, earth elements, etc.).  A few seemed unfamiliar at first, then later quite obvious, especially butter, malt, and cocoa.  Aside from that issue I'm not familiar with a lot of types of smells that relate to flavors that are not tied to food tastes, like different flowers.

Tea flavor wheel examples

Two sample flavor wheels follow, both of which are not so different, and seem pretty good:




Twinnings tea flavor wheel

 




Temple Mountain flavor wheel

Using the wheel, how to taste tea

Twinnings has suggestions on their site about tasting tea, more methodology than I use related to this.  They mention trying to identify what you taste as the general flavor impression that strikes you first, then the main impression, and the most detailed flavors that linger after, as head, body, and tail.  Tea tasting classes would identify tasting methodologies like this better, with guidance on specific examples.  Of course the idea of a "finish" is not unique to tea, and can be an interesting effect.

For me the teas seem to separate out into flavor elements on different levels.  I think of them in a spatial way, as a base of main flavors, with some undertones that underlie that, and "higher" tones of more specific and somewhat isolated flavor elements.  One could instead think of these as front, middle, and back, closer to how Twinnings is describing tasting, but their method is chronological, not really related to how individual flavors seem to strike the palate differently as an arrangement of different component levels.  Some teas emphasize a certain "level," for example some oolongs might have lots of rich flavors and a nice feel but not so many "forward" or "higher" flavor components.

All of this could make tea tasting more complicated than it really needs to be.  Some teas seem to present quite simple flavor profiles anyway, just a few basic flavors.  Or complex teas could include many flavor elements that are so mixed it could be hard to separate them out without a lot of practice (like a blended tea might).  More typically good single-source teas seem to show a number of different flavor elements that one can identify separately with practice, as the categories in these wheels indicate.  For me if I like the flavor elements that works better than looking for a certain balance in different types of tastes and body elements, but then what I like changes over time.

Temperate climate bias in tea wheels

As I've been tasting teas it occured to me that these wheels are incomplete.  In the tropics there are a number of different vegetables, fruits, and herbs, and many of the flavors on these wheels would be known as imported foods that not all would have much exposure to.  There are "tropical" fruit sections on these, the main ones familiar in the West, but even for the few mentioned there are lots of types of these fruits covering a range of different tastes.  In Thailand and elsewhere there are many individual types of mangos, pineapples, or even bananas, all of which share some taste components, but all of which can vary quite a bit, as apples do.  Even more fruits you just never hear of in the West:  mangosteen, rambutan, longan, longon, jackfruit, durian, and so on.  Most of them are delicious and easy to adapt to but unfamiliar textures can be an issue.

For vegetables, herbs, and flowers the difference is more pronounced; Thais eat dozens of things that initially were unfamiliar to me.  Some of it translates or can go by Western names (like banana flower, lotus root, or morning glory), or some only seem to have Thai names, so often I'm eating things I recognize on sight only.

Back to tea tasting:  recently I was trying a bai mu dan (or white peony) with a friend, which seemed to taste like apricot to me, an element described in the write-up as melon.  She said it tasted more like dried persimmon, which was exactly it.  I've had fresh and dried persimmon but I never would have made that connection.  It's hard to describe what the fruit tastes like, maybe like apricot.  

That same friend had mentioned some teas taste like orchid, or lotus flower before, but not being familiar with these smells I couldn't really know.  Later I checked by smelling lotus flowers at the house when they bloomed.

Next steps:  advanced palate training

Tasting flavors as they come up in teas is a good way to "train" the average tea drinker, but there might be other ways to push that further.  Nigel Melican recently posted about use of aroma samples in wine tasting (sample site link), which could also be applied to tea.