Sweetness
Tea contains almost no sugar, and yet a good one can taste distinctly sweet. Most of that sweetness is real taste rather than suggestion, and some of it is aroma your brain files as sweet because it has met it in sweet things before.
- Sensed as
- taste
- Compounds
- soluble carbohydrates, and amino acids contributing a sweet edge
- Rises with
- cooler water, shorter steeps, roasting, a cup left to cool a little
- Falls with
- hotter water, longer steeps, anything that raises bitterness
What it is
A taste, and usually a quiet one. In tea it rarely arrives as a front-loaded sugariness. More often it turns up at the end, as the liquor leaves and the mouth is left with something soft and faintly honeyed. Chinese tasters have a word for the returning sweetness that follows a bitter or brisk swallow, and it is worth learning to notice separately from the sweetness you taste on the way in.
Where it comes from
Soluble carbohydrates from the leaf, plus amino acids that carry a sweet edge alongside their savoury one. Roasting adds more by caramelising sugars that were already there, which is why a charcoal-roasted oolong can taste sweeter than the same leaf unroasted while containing no more sugar. A large part of what people call sweetness is aroma rather than taste: honey, stone fruit and malt reach you retronasally and get scored as sweet.
Which teas show it
Clearest in roasted oolongs, in white teas, in well-made shou puer and in the returning sweetness after a good young sheng. Black teas from Yunnan often read as malty-sweet. A shaded Japanese green tastes sweet in a different register, closer to the sweetness of stock than of sugar, because there it is riding on amino acids.
How to turn it down
Rarely wanted, but hotter water and longer steeps will bury it under bitterness and astringency without removing it.
How to turn it up
Cooler water and shorter steeps, which is the opposite of most advice for getting more out of a leaf. Sweetness and the amino acids behind it extract at lower temperatures than the catechins, so a gentler brew shifts the balance toward it. Letting a cup cool slightly before drinking often reveals sweetness that was buried under heat.
What it gets confused with
Smoothness, because a tea with no rough edges reads as sweeter than it is. Also confused with the fruity and floral aroma axes: a tea that smells of peach will be scored sweet by most people even when the taste is neutral. If you want to separate them, hold your nose for one sip. What is left is taste.
What people get wrong
Expecting sweetness to arrive at the front. In tea it is usually a finish, and a taster who is only paying attention while the liquor is in the mouth will miss most of it. The other mistake is assuming a sweet tea has sugar in it worth counting. It does not: the quantities are tiny, and the perception is doing most of the work.
