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Vegetal

Fresh grass, spinach, snap peas, cut stems. The green side of tea, and the axis that separates a well-made green tea from an overworked one.

Sensed as
aroma
Compounds
green leaf volatiles, chiefly (E)-2-hexenal
Rises with
fresh leaf, steaming rather than pan firing, shading
Falls with
age, oxidation, pan firing, roasting

What it is

An aroma with a clear split down the middle. On one side sits fresh vegetal: cut grass, garden peas, something alive. On the other sits cooked vegetal: boiled spinach, steamed greens, and at the far end the flat sulphurous note of vegetables left too long in the pan. The first is a quality, the second is usually a warning about the water temperature.

Where it comes from

Green leaf volatiles, chiefly the aldehyde hexenal and its relatives. These are the compounds any plant releases when its leaves are cut, which is why the smell of fresh green tea and the smell of mown grass are genuinely related rather than metaphorically so. Steaming preserves them, which is why Japanese greens are the most vegetal teas made. Pan firing drives more of them off, which is why Chinese greens lean nuttier.

Which teas show it

Highest in Japanese steamed greens, sencha above all, and in matcha. Present in Chinese pan-fired greens in a gentler, nuttier form. Almost absent from oxidised teas, since oxidation consumes the compounds behind it, which is why a black tea that tastes vegetal is usually a sign of an unfinished process rather than a style.

How to turn it down

Cooler water is the fix for the cooked end of this axis rather than the fresh end. Water near boiling on a delicate Japanese green pushes it straight from grassy to boiled spinach, and no amount of shortening the steep undoes that once the leaf has been scalded.

How to turn it up

Fresh leaf and cool water. This axis fades faster in storage than almost any other, so a vegetal tea more than a year old will have lost much of what it had. Buy small and drink quickly.

What it gets confused with

Umami, in Japanese teas particularly, because the two arrive together and the marine descriptors sit between them. Umami is a taste and coats the mouth; vegetal is an aroma and does not. Also confused with astringency in raw green teas, where the drying and the grassiness are two separate things happening at once.

What people get wrong

Treating vegetal as one thing. A taster who scores fresh grass and boiled spinach identically has thrown away the most useful signal on this axis, because one says the tea is good and the other says the kettle was too hot. The second mistake is expecting a Chinese green to be as vegetal as a Japanese one and calling it weak when it is not. Pan firing and steaming are different decisions with different results, not degrees of the same thing.

If this is your problem

teabert, the tealytics teapot, keeper of the kettle
Fresh grass and boiled spinach are both vegetal and they mean opposite things. Note which one you got.

Sources