How is Tea Tasting is Done?

The term tea tasting is very self-explanatory. Professional tasters taste a sample of tea to evaluate its qualities before exporting it to other countries. Another reason these people take joy in sampling the tea is that once in while they discover new taste and new flavor in the same kind of tea. Hard work but is very exciting. Professional tea tasters often refer to this process as tea cupping. It generally means a loud slurp of tea when sampling.

How you can sample tea like pros?

However, sampling tea isn't just reserved for professionals; anyone can try this at home to find out different tastes of tea. This can be a fun activity if you want your guests to try figure out the type of tea they are sampling. The teas should be somewhat similar so it's going a fun challenge.

Anyway, before you can start sampling tea, you would need several equipments like: 5-6 white cups, teaspoon, small scale to weight the tea, and a kettle for hot water. White cups are preferred because you don't only want to taste the tea, you want to observe the color and the texture of the leaves after brewed.

What to do?

First, line up the cups and the tea in 2 rows. If you have difficulty remembering the names of the tea, you can write the names on index cards and place them under the cups. The teas are often kind of similar in taste, so putting the names down can help you out a bit.Before adding anything to the cup, you should keep in mind to add tea and water 1 cup at a time. After finish tasting the 1st cup, then you can add tea and water to the 2nd cup and repeat the whole process again.

Then you add 1 to 2 teaspoons of tea into each up. But keep in mind that the quantity must be the same for all the cups. If you use 1 teaspoon for the first cups, use 1 teaspoon for all of the cups. The reason is that different quantity can affect the taste. Thus, this will defeat the whole purpose of finding the quality and special characteristics of seemingly similar teas.After the tea, you can water to each cup. You also should keep the amount of water consistent in all of the cups. Let the tea brew for 3-4 minutes.

How you can take notes?

You can take notes on your personal tea cupping for future use. This can come very handy if your friends happen to ask you to help them shopping for teas, you will know exactly how some of different types of tea tastes like.

After the tea is brewed, you take a big mouthful of tea so all parts of your mouth is submerged in tea. Then you gradually swallow it while noticing different flavors of the tea begin to emerge at different parts of your tongue. You can make some notes on this. Although most people aren't professional tea tasters, you can still kind of distinguish the difference in the tastes of different teas.

Often people can taste a cup of tea twice to further evaluate any hidden characteristics that they missed from the first taste. But too much tea tasting can actually wear out your taste buds. So limit yourself to 1-2 taste per cup and 4-5 types of teas. If you do tea cupping often, you can collect tremendous information on different kinds of tea. So next time you go shopping for tea, you don't have to take the sellers' words for the taste of any tea. You already know what you want, go for it...

Tea terms to describe the taste

Here are some of the terminologies often used by professional tea tasters. We think that you might be interested in these to help you in your own personal tea tasting experience.

Common: tea tastes like flavored water, nothing stands out
Flat: lack of freshness
Dull: often refer to the color of the tea. The tea is cloudy.
Light: lack of strength and bright color
Full: nice fragrance, pleasant taste, and beautiful color
Metallic: the fragrance and taste similar to heated metals (often refer to black teas)
Heavy: full-bodied and strong tea
Weedy: fragrance and taste like grass after the rain (often refer to green teas)
Pungent: bitter and harsh taste