The Essence of Tea: The Transformational Journey of a Tea Connoisseur by Jenny Tse

Author:Jenny Tse [Tse, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sipping Streams Publishing
Published: 2018-11-13T18:30:00+00:00

Oolong tea: 195 degrees F, 3 minutes

Black and herbal tea: 205 degrees F, 3-5 minutes

At a glance, you get a sense of how temperature and time affects taste! Using too much tea or using a different temperature and steeping time leads to a completely different result.

Your Experience

Taste is incredibly and completely subjective. You will develop your own palate from your own experiences and associations. There is no right or wrong way to express the way you experience tea and how it tastes to you. Like I said, it is entirely subjective. The same is true with anything you taste – it’s you tasting it, no one else.

When I first started to learn to taste tea, I described it as memories I had based on what I knew about my grandfather and what he drank or the way he smelled. Smell is a very powerful memory trigger. Some teas reminded me of the smell of his pillow or clothing. I did not have enough experience or the vocabulary yet to describe it any other way. While it was very pleasant, my description might be of walking through a cold, wet rainforest in Sitka, Alaska. That may not sound appetizing to someone else, but it was the triggered memory of the taste that might be described as musty and woodsy.

Learning how to express yourself – whether from something you lived through, smelled, or ate – is completely okay. It is your own personal experience and association. It is how you build and develop your palate for tea… or anything.

I encourage you to break out of your own mold of the assumptions you may have. You might just surprise yourself! A lot of people hesitate to drink teas they assume they don’t like. We offer a “tea of the day” sample. On days when it happens to be a green tea, we often hear, “Nope. I don’t like green tea.” Based on their previous experience, they assume they don’t like green tea. However, the offer is one sample of only one of our green teas… and we have eight different types. They all taste drastically different from each other.

Additionally, most people burn their green tea. Green tea should use only steaming hot water. As we just covered, temperature affects taste. If you steep delicate green tea in boiling water, you are going to have an extremely astringent, potent tea. This is probably what leads to “Nope. I don’t like green tea.” There’s nothing wrong with it, but steeping at a high temperature forces the flavor too quickly. You now have a concentrated cup of tea. If you taste a green tea you don’t prefer, add water and see what happens. You might find you enjoy it more by diluting it.

If there’s a tea that you smell and don’t think you’ll like, be sure to make it the proper way before you pass judgment. Keep in mind also that it typically takes 20 tastings until you may develop a palate for it. You may never prefer it, but if you want to expand your palate, keep tasting.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.