How to Judge Tea: 4 Clues to Tea Quality

Learn how we judge tea quality at CC Fine Tea every day!

Have you ever brought home a new tea because the sales person told you how delicious it was? Did you feel a little suspicious that their description may have clouded your taste perception? The best way to determine the quality of a tea is to judge it yourself.

While drinking a tea in your favorite mug might reveal some of its qualities, it is not an objective observance, and subjective feelings may cloud your judgement.

Preparation for Tea Tasting: Mise En Place

Mise en place is a French term used in cooking, meaning “everything in its place.” Just like cooking, the best way to begin a serious tea tasting is to prepare your environment. The area should be clean and organized. There should be no distractions or extraneous items in the tasting area.

Water

You will need hot water. Generally the water should be at the upper range for the type of tea you are drinking, but it is more important that all samples are made at the same temperature.

Brewing Vessels

You will need teaware to brew in. Gaiwans are not recommended since they make it difficult to keep the brews consistent. What we use are simple, thick, porcelain bowls and a fine mesh strainer.

Tea Leaves

For an accurate judgement of a tea, it is important to have a control tea – something to judge your sample against. Set up a side-by-side tasting, comparing your new tea and another tea in the same category. It is much easier to taste the differences between teas than it is to find traits in just one tea alone.

For 6 fluid ounces of water, use 2g of green, black, or white tea or 3g of oolong or Pu-Erh. We recommend purchasing an inexpensive gram scale for measuring tea because it is the most accurate way to measure, but if that is not your thing, try using half a tablespoon of leaves.

Brew Timer

Finally, you will need to measure the time. A cell phone works well for this, but you could use a microwave timer, a watch, or an hourglass designed for tea brewing. We will need to time five minutes.

Mindful Awareness

Once you have everything set up and ready to go, you can take a moment and a deep breath to relax and find yourself in the present moment. A calm and observant state of mind is also important for tea tasting.

Judging Tea Quality

Tea tasting can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. The essentials for judging tea are:

1. Leaf Shape
2. Aroma
3. Color
4. Taste

Leaf Shape

First, you will want to look at the dry leaves. Smell them. It helps to know something about how that particular tea is graded, but the most important thing is that the tea smells pleasant and looks clean.

Now, place the tea you have measured out into the brewing vessels, add the water, and start your timer. After five minutes, pour the tea through the strainer and place the wet leaves where you can see them.

Aroma

Smell the wet leaves right after pouring off the water. Here’s what to look for: good aromas are rich and round, a saturated range of smells that are pleasingly related to each other. On the other hand, there may be some unpleasant tea smells.

For example, green tea should taste ‘fresh’, whether of fresh orchids, chestnuts, or vegetables. Green tea can also taste like wilted flowers, old chestnuts, or spoiled vegetables. A related flavor, sure, but very unpleasant.

High quality teas will retain their aroma in the wet leaves for longer than lower quality teas.

Color

Look at the color of the liquid. It should look clear and rich. Particles at the bottom are ok, cloudy tea is not. The liquid should look rich, like watercolor paint. Chinese green tea should look faintly yellow/green, and be shiny, not dull. White tea should look light gold. Black tea should range from bronze to dark red, and oolongs fall between green-yellow and dark red.

Taste

Taste the liquid by dipping a large spoon into the hot tea and either filling a small cup, or drinking directly from the spoon.

Remember that the ideal tasting temperature is lower than the ideal brewing temperature. Spitting the liquid back out into a different cup or the sink allows the tea to aerate better on your tongue, but I find that simply concentrating on drinking the tea is less distracting to me. You can also slurp the tea to aerate it and cool it down, which allows you to taste the flavor more fully.

Try to form your opinion on the flavor based on the first taste or two. It is easy to overthink, and your first impression is generally the most accurate.

Questions We Ask When Tasting Tea:

• Is this tea unpleasantly bitter?
• Is this tea unpleasantly astringent (makes your tongue feel dry)?
• What is the main flavor of this tea?
• Is the tea even (balanced) or sharp (one flavor is unpleasantly strong)?
• If the tea is complex (many flavors), does this add depth to the tea, or simply make it taste muddy (the flavors blend into an indecipherable mess)
• If the tea is not complex, are there one or two strong, pleasant flavors that make the tea enjoyable, or is it lackluster and shallow?
• Is there a pleasant lingering flavor that slowly tapers off, or does it end quickly? Or worse, does it morph into a lingering unpleasant taste?

Why Judge Tea Quality by Cupping?

Usually when comparing similar teas for sight, smell, and taste, it is not so difficult to decide which tea you like more. Bitterness alone may be difficult to quantify, but comparing bitterness side by side is much easier.

We encourage you to taste all of the tea you get and form your own opinions. We go through this same tea judgment process when we are quality controlling at our gardens and sourcing from our partners.

The more attention that people pay to what they are drinking, the more the demand for high quality tea will increase. And that means better tea for everyone.