Spicy
Cinnamon, clove, cardamom, black pepper, warm wood. In tea this means aromatic spice rather than heat, and it is the axis most likely to be describing something that was added to the leaf rather than grown in it.
- Sensed as
- aroma
- Compounds
- not established as one group; varies by tea and by any spice in the blend
- Rises with
- longer steeps in a spiced blend, ageing in sheng puer
- Falls with
- a much shorter steep in a spiced blend
What it is
An aroma, and specifically not a burn. Chilli heat is a trigeminal pain signal and has nothing to do with this axis; nothing in unflavoured tea produces it. What tasters mean by spicy in tea is the warm, dry, faintly resinous aroma family that cinnamon, clove and cardamom share, sometimes with a peppery edge in the finish.
Where it comes from
No single compound family owns it, which is unusual on this list and worth stating plainly rather than papering over. Some of it is genuine leaf aroma: aged sheng and certain Wuyi oolongs develop a woody-spiced character with no additive involved. A great deal of it, in practice, arrives from actual spice in the blend, since chai, spiced black teas and Christmas blends are a large share of what people rate as spicy.
Which teas show it
Masala chai and every spiced blend, where the spice is literally present. Wuyi yancha, which often shows a cinnamon-bark note that gave one famous cultivar, Rou Gui, its name. Aged sheng puer, which can move toward camphor and dried spice with time. Some Yunnan black teas carry a peppery finish.
How to turn it down
In a blend, shorten the steep sharply. Cassia and clove will dominate a cup within a minute, and the tea underneath them is usually gone by then.
How to turn it up
For a blend, longer steeping and boiling water, since the spices are woodier than the leaf and give up their aroma more slowly. For an unflavoured tea, a hot short infusion, as with every aroma axis.
What it gets confused with
Roasted, since both are warm and dry, and a heavy charcoal roast can read as clove to some tasters. Also confused with earthy in aged sheng, where camphor and spice and old wood arrive together. If the tea is a blend, the honest answer is usually that you are tasting the spice rather than the leaf, and that is worth recording as such.
What people get wrong
Expecting heat. A tea described as spicy will not burn, and looking for a burn means missing the aroma that was meant. The other mistake is scoring a chai high on this axis and treating that as information about the tea. It is information about the blend, and the leaf underneath deserves its own note.
