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Tea Tasting Glossary
Terms describing dry leaf
Black
- a black appearance is desirable, preferably with bloom.
Blackish - a satisfactory
appearance for CTC type teas. Denotes careful sorting.
Bloom - a sign of good
manufacture and sorting (where reduction of leaf has taken
place before firing), a sheen that has not been lost through
over-handling or over-sorting.
Bold
- particles of leaf, which are too large for the particular
grade.
Brown - a brown
appearance in CTC type teas that normally indicates overly
harsh treatment of the leaf.
Chesty
– tea tainted by inferior unseasoned packing materials.
Chunky - a very large
broken-leaf tea.
Clean
- leaf that is free from fibre, dirt and all extraneous
matter.
Crepy - leaf
with a crimped appearance, common to larger grade, broken-leaf
teas such as BOP.
Curly
- leaf appearance of whole leaf grade teas such as OP
as distinct from wiry.
Even
- teas true to their grade, consisting of pieces of leaf
of fairly even size.
Flaky
- flat, open pieces of leaf, often light in texture.
Grey - caused by too much
abrasion in sorting.
Grainy
- describes primary grades of well-made CTC teas such
as Pekoe Dust.
Leafy
- a tea in which the leaf tends to be on the large or
longish size.
Light
- tea light in weight, of poor density and sometimes flaky.
Make - a term used to
describe a tea manufacture batch.
Mushy-
tea that has been packed or stored with a high moisture
content.
Neat - a
grade of tea having good 'make' and size.
Nose
- smell of the dry leaf.
Powdery
- fine light dust, as the tea people say, meaning a very
fine light leaf particle.
Ragged
- an uneven, badly manufactured and graded tea.
Stalk and fibre - bits of tea
bush other than the leaf, which should be minimal in superior
grades, but are unavoidable in lower-grade teas.
Tip - a sign of fine plucking,
apparent in top grades of tea.
Uneven
and Mixed - uneven pieces of leaf particles, indicating
poor sorting and resulting in a tea that is not true to
a particular grade.
Well
Twisted - used to describe whole leaf orthodox
tea grades, often referred to as well made or rolled.
Wiry - leaf appearance
of a well-twisted, thin, longleaf. |
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