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Aroma

Five of the thirteen things Tealytics asks you to rate are not tastes at all. They are smells, and most of them reach you through the back of your throat rather than through your nose. Understanding that one route explains more about tasting than anything else on this site.

What it is

Smell arrives two ways. Orthonasal olfaction is what happens when you put your nose over the leaf and inhale: odour molecules travel in through the nostrils. Retronasal olfaction happens while you are drinking: molecules released in your warm mouth travel up behind the palate into the nasal cavity from the inside. Both end at the same sheet of receptor cells, and your brain files the second one as taste even though no taste receptor is involved. That is why a blocked nose makes food bland, and why floral, fruity, vegetal, roasted, earthy and spicy all belong to this page.

How to do it

Smell the dry leaf in a warmed vessel. Smell the wet leaf immediately after pouring off, which is usually the single most informative moment in a session. While drinking, take enough liquor to fill the mouth and breathe out gently through the nose after swallowing, which pushes the retronasal fraction across the receptors. Then smell the empty cup once it has cooled a little: the heavier aromatics linger there after everything else has gone.

What to look for

The difference between what the dry leaf, the wet leaf and the liquor tell you. They are often three different teas. A dry leaf can smell of nothing much and a wet leaf can be spectacular. Note which one you are describing, because a tasting note that does not say is hard to use later.

What people get wrong

Quoting a number for how many smells a human can tell apart. You will see ten thousand, and sometimes forty thousand. The ten thousand figure is a rough estimate from the 1920s that survived by repetition. A 2014 paper put it above one trillion, and the following year a re-analysis showed the method could produce almost any answer from the same data and that the geometry gave an upper bound where the paper claimed a lower one. The honest position is that nobody knows, which does not make your nose less capable. It just means the confident number in the tea book was never measured. The other mistake is holding a cup still under your nose: aroma sits in a plume, and moving the cup slightly finds far more than keeping it steady.

teabert, the tealytics teapot, keeper of the kettle
Smell the wet leaf before you drink. It is the most informative ten seconds of the whole session and almost nobody uses it.

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