Tea tasting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tea tasting is the process in which a trained taster will determine the quality of a particular tea. Due to climatic conditions, topography, manufacturing process, and different clones of the Camellia Sinensis plant (tea), the final product will have vastly differing flavours and appearance. These differences can be tasted by a trained taster in order to ascertain the quality prior to sale or possibly blending tea.
A tea taster will use a large spoon and noisily slurp the liquid into his/her mouth - this ensures that both the tea and plenty of oxygen is passed over all the taste receptors on the tongue to give an even taste profile of the tea. The liquid is then usually spat back out into a spitoon before moving onto the next sample to taste. The flavour characteristics and indeed leaf colour, size and shape will be graded using a specific language created by the tea industry to explain the overall quality. Generally speaking, once the quality has been tasted/graded, each tea company will place a value on it based on market trends, availabilty and demand.
