How to taste
Tasting tea properly is a short, repeatable routine. It takes about a minute per cup, it needs nothing you do not already own, and it is the difference between logging an impression and logging something you can compare against later.
What it is
A sequence, not a talent. Professional cupping standardises the leaf weight, the water and the time so that the only variable left is the tea. You do not need the full apparatus, but you do need the discipline: the same vessel, the same ratio and the same water, or you are comparing your brewing rather than your teas.
How to do it
Smell the dry leaf first, in a warmed empty vessel, since gentle heat lifts the aroma. Brew. Smell the wet leaf before you touch the liquor, because it is more concentrated there than in the cup and often much clearer. Then take a sip large enough to reach the whole mouth, not a polite one. Move it around so it touches everywhere, and let some air through it if you can do so without choking: that pushes aroma up the back of the throat, which is where most of what you call flavour is actually detected. Swallow, then wait. Count to ten. Astringency, sweetness and the finish all arrive in that gap, and a taster who has already moved on to the next sip misses them entirely.
What to look for
Take the three systems in order rather than all at once. Taste first: is there sweetness, bitterness, savouriness. Aroma second: what does it remind you of, and if no word comes, the word list is on the finding the word page. Mouthfeel last: how heavy is it, does it dry your mouth, does it catch anywhere. Doing them in order is what keeps you from collapsing all thirteen ratings into a general impression of good or bad.
What people get wrong
Swirling the liquor to reach the different taste zones on your tongue. There are no taste zones. The map with sweet at the tip and bitter at the back comes from a 1901 dissertation whose small regional differences were redrawn as exclusive territories in a 1942 textbook, was measured again and dismissed in 1974, and was closed for good in 2006 when the receptor work showed all five modalities are detected across the whole tongue. Keep the swirling: coating your mouth genuinely helps, because it puts liquor on more receptors, drives aroma up the retronasal route and is the only way to judge texture. Just drop the reason. The other mistake is tasting one tea alone. A single cup with nothing to compare it against tells you almost nothing, which is what the calibration page is about.
Sources
- There is no tongue map: all five taste modalities are detected across the whole tongue rather than in separate zones. Chandrashekar, Hoon, Ryba and Zuker, 'The receptors and cells for mammalian taste', Nature 444 (2006), 288-294
- The tongue map originates in a misreading of Hänig's 1901 results and persisted through mid-century textbooks. Smithsonian Magazine, 'The taste map of the tongue you learned in school is all wrong' (2017)