How to Taste Tea

Enjoying tea comes in many ways. It can be as simple as cuddling a warm cup in your hands, bringing a sense of grounding and composure or it can be a more indepth experience where you dive in all the way. Here are 6 Steps to maximize your tea experience and learn how to appreciate a tea from start to finish.

Before you start, here are a few noteworthy practices. 
(1) Make sure your palate is clean, no residual taste from food or drinks in your mouth.
(2) Brew your tea in a way to extract all of the potential flavours. If you are a beginner, ideally follow the recommended instructions for Gong Fu Cha brewing style (~ 4-5g of tea in ~150ml water). If you prefer, there's nothing wrong with starting with the brewing style you are most familiar with. 
In time and with practice you will be able to adjust your brewing parameters to your taste. If you are a well seasoned tea brewer, go with your flow.

6 Tea Tasting Steps

Step 1 - The Dry Leaves - Before brewing your tea, look at the shape, the size, and the finish (matte or shiny) of the tea leaves. Some teas can be identified after this first step.

Step 2 - The Warmed or Wet leaves - Generally dry tea leaves have limited aromas to offer. To release them, heat your brewing vessel with hot water, discard the hot water, add in your dry tea leaves, stir them gently and smell. These aromatic compounds will be changing throughout your tasting session. Taking time to appreciate the aromas at this stage adds one more layer of sensory entertainment.

Step 3 - The Liquor - The liquor in the tea world lingo refers to the actual brewed tea in water. Take note of its colour, texture and clarity.

Step 4 - The Taste - Make sure you coat your entire mouth well when you sip/slurp your tea and swirl it around gently. Breath out through your nose while the tea is in your mouth and also after you have swallowed it. 
While the sense of taste helps identify basic information about sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savoury (umami), most of our tasting experience is through the smell sensory receptor cells that line the membranes far back in the nose.  So slurp gently to aerate the tea and breath out through your nose to capture all the tasting notes.

Step 5 - The Finish - Note the lingering after taste flavours in your mouth.  How does your mouth feel?  Dryness on the sides of the tongue or at back of the throat? A quenching juicy sensation? Different teas will express their finish in their own unique way.

Step 6 - Body Sensation - Perhaps the most subtle effect at the beginning of a tea tasting is the body sensation produced from the tea. But after drinking a few brews, note your body and state of mind. Are you feeling relaxed, calm, energized, uplifted, alert, cheery, meditative, creative, giddy like in a state of drunkenness, a little warmer or a  cooling effect, or perhaps light headed? Tea drunk is a common expression and is used to describe the body sensation felt after drinking too much tea.

A tea tasting is not a one shot event. The momentum starts with the appearance of the dry leaves, connecting us to the farmer, the terroir and the process. It then takes us to our memory bank, where our brains are teased to link stored information from our past sensory history to the present moment.  And finally it leaves us replenished. It is a great practice to mindfulness, focusing in the moment all while pleasuring and entertaining your taste buds.

Taste perception develops with time, repeated exposures and practice. At first, green teas,  just like wine, may all taste the same and it isn't until after several brewing session that the brain starts to differentiate between flavours. 
Start small and simple with a cup, a kettle, a small teapot and tea. Play, practice and have fun experimenting. The tea world is fascinating.