Finding the word
You can tell two teas apart but cannot say how. That is the most common problem in tasting, and it is a vocabulary problem rather than a palate problem. This page is the word list.
What it is
Descriptor words, grouped under the rating each one belongs to. They go in the descriptors field on a flavour note, the free-text one that suggests honey, jasmine, citrus.
This is not the same thing as the thirteen ratings, and the two are not competing lists. The ratings are numbers and they answer how much: how astringent, how sweet, how floral, on a scale. The words here answer which, and there is no scale on them at all. Nobody scores jasmine out of ten. You write jasmine down. Both belong on the same note and they do different jobs.
How to do it
Work from the rating you just gave. If you scored floral a 7 and want to say more than that, read the floral list and see whether one word fits. If none does, write your own next to it: a private descriptor you use consistently is worth more than a published one you use vaguely. Do this with the wet leaf as well as the liquor, since concentrated aroma is easier to name.
What to look for
The groups you keep returning to. Over a few dozen sessions your notes will show a much narrower range than this page does, and that range is your palate rather than a gap in it. This is a prompt for the sessions where nothing comes to mind, not a checklist to complete.
What people get wrong
Looking for the tea flavour wheel and expecting this to be it. There is not one. Coffee standardised on the SCA Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel in 1995 and revised it with World Coffee Research in 2016, and tea has nothing with that status: several wheels exist, they disagree with each other, and the sensory literature says plainly that tea lags coffee and wine on shared terminology. So treat any tea wheel you meet, including this list, as one useful vocabulary rather than the official one. The second mistake is expecting a word list to cover mouthfeel the way it covers aroma. It cannot: body and smoothness are texture, and most published descriptor sets are built from smells.
Words, grouped by what you would rate them under
- Sweetnesshoney, caramel, toffee, malt, molasses, maple syrup, nectar, chocolate, burnt sugar, candy
- Bitternesscacao, grapefruit pith, hops, walnut skin, medicinal, sharp
- Umamibrothy, savoury, seaweed, sea air, stock, fish
- Floraljasmine, orchid, osmanthus, rose, lilac, lavender, gardenia, honeysuckle, orange blossom, cherry blossom, geranium, dandelion, perfume, hops
- Fruityberry, citrus, tree fruit, tropical, dried fruit, muscatel, stone fruit
- Vegetalgrass, leafy green, brassica, herbal, bitter greens, root vegetable, stem vegetable
- Roastedtoast, smoke, ash, tar, tobacco, fireplace, grilled food, burnt toast, roasted nuts, chestnut, hazelnut, almond, walnut, peanut, grain, rice
- Earthyforest floor, wet earth, damp wood, moss, leather, musk, game, wet fur, cellar
- Spicycinnamon, clove, cardamom, nutmeg, pepper, licorice, vanilla, cocoa, camphor
- Mineralwet stones, flint, slate, salt, brass, metallic
- Astringencydrying, puckering, rough, tannic, harsh, brisk, pungent
- Bodyfull, thick, ample, robust, light, watery, unctuous
- Smoothnesssilky, velvety, round, mellow, supple, smooth
Sources
- Tea has no canonical flavour wheel. Coffee's SCA Taster's Flavor Wheel has had that status since 1995 and was revised with World Coffee Research in 2016. Perfect Daily Grind, 'The evolution of the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel' (2021)
- Several competing tea flavour wheels exist and none has achieved industry-wide adoption. Camellia Sinensis, 'The Camellia Sinensis tea flavour wheel', first published 2008
- Published tea sensory lexicons exist and are built by trained panels rather than agreed across the industry. Lee and Chambers, 'A lexicon for flavor descriptive analysis of green tea', Journal of Sensory Studies 22 (2007)
- The aroma and taste descriptor vocabulary is transcribed from a published tea taxonomy. Gebely, 'Tea: a user's guide' (2016), chapter 17, evaluating tea