Body
How much the liquor seems to weigh in the mouth. A tea with body fills the space and coats it; one without runs straight through like water with a flavour in it. This is texture, not strength and not flavour intensity.
- Sensed as
- mouthfeel
- Compounds
- polysaccharides and dissolved solids
- Rises with
- more leaf, broken leaf and buds, later infusions in a heavy brew
- Falls with
- less leaf, more water, filtering out fines
What it is
A mouthfeel, closest to what wine tasters mean by weight. A full-bodied tea has presence: it sits, it coats, it takes a moment to clear. A light-bodied one is gone immediately. The confusing part is that a light-bodied tea can be intensely flavoured and a full-bodied one can be quiet, because the two are genuinely independent, which is exactly why the app scores them separately.
Where it comes from
Dissolved solids, and polysaccharides in particular, which raise the liquor's viscosity in a way the mouth reads as weight. Leaf material and grade matter: broken leaf and buds release more soluble matter faster than large intact leaf. So does the sheer amount of leaf, which is why the single most reliable route to a fuller cup is more leaf rather than more time.
Which teas show it
Ripe shou puer is the standard reference for a thick, syrupy body. Aged sheng, well-made Wuyi oolong and dense black teas from Assam also carry it. Delicate white teas and light Chinese greens sit at the other end by design, and thin body in a silver needle is the style rather than a fault.
How to turn it down
Less leaf, more water. Filtering out fine particles helps a little, since some of what reads as body in a broken-leaf tea is suspended fines rather than dissolved matter.
How to turn it up
More leaf. Nothing else comes close. A longer steep adds bitterness and astringency faster than it adds body, whereas raising the leaf-to-water ratio raises body directly. This is the core of why gongfu brewing produces such a different cup from western brewing with the same leaf: it is a body-first method.
What it gets confused with
Astringency, which is the important one: a strongly drying tea feels like it is doing a lot in the mouth and gets scored as full-bodied when it is actually thin and rough. Also confused with strength, which is not on this list at all and usually means flavour intensity or caffeine. A tea can be strong and thin, or mild and thick.
What people get wrong
Chasing body with time. A four-minute steep of too little leaf gives you a bitter thin cup, not a full one. The other mistake is treating full body as always better. A gyokuro or a white tea is not trying to be thick, and scoring it down for that is scoring it against a style it was never in.
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