How should I taste ripe Pu-erh tea?
Tasting tea is, in essence, drinking it attentively. When drinking a cup of ripe Pu-erh, we can evaluate it across six dimensions: aroma, sweetness, purity, thickness, smoothness, and throat resonance — examining the fragrance, sweet level, cleanliness and purity, body, silkiness, and the throat’s response. This is the more universal method, but it sounds complex with so many indicators. A simpler approach is to use your own standards. List what you expect from a good ripe Pu-erh, then drink and see if it meets your criteria.
For example, say Tea Friend A values three indicators in ripe Pu-erh: first purity, then the sense of age, and third the “rice soup” sensation. When drinking, they focus on these three aspects. The moment the tea enters the mouth, is it pure and clean? You know immediately. Then sense the age — is there a mature fragrance? Aged tea always gives an impression of warm mellowness, and you can taste the sediment of passing years. Whether a tea has a sense of age can be detected through drinking. Next, as the liquor moves through your mouth, does it feel like drinking rice soup? If so, the liquor is generally smooth, with a lingering presence in the throat.
When tasting ripe tea, we typically finish one infusion cup by cup. We can try focusing on one particular characteristic per cup, concentrating our attention on a single point, so the experience becomes more vivid. Finally, combine the impressions from each dimension to arrive at a complete assessment of the ripe tea.
Clean: Holding a cup of ripe tea, the first sensation upon drinking should be clean. No off-flavors, no strange odors, no odd tastes — it feels comfortable, with no discomfort.
Sweet: On the second cup, taste carefully. Now you can sense the sweetness of the liquor, which is a more intuitive gustatory impression. As the tea enters your mouth, sweetness follows — direct and obvious.
Moisturizing: Sweetness is a direct flavor — sweet is sweet, and we can taste it clearly. But what about “moisturizing”? Moisturizing is the sensation of quenching thirst and generating saliva. After a sip, you feel your mouth is nourished and comfortable. Inferior ripe Pu-erh not only fails to moisturize, it may even cause a throat-catching sensation — after drinking, your throat feels dry and itchy.
Thick: In the next cup, hold the tea liquor in your mouth without rushing to swallow. Feel its rich inner substance — that is thickness. The tea must have substance, unlike some teas that have some tea flavor on entry but feel thin and watery once held in the mouth (a tea-water separation sensation). Good ripe tea should have a viscous, gelatinous quality, like drinking a bowl of thick rice soup.
Smooth: In this cup, we focus on the smoothness of the ripe tea. Hold the liquor in your mouth — it glides smoothly, feeling comfortable, requiring little effort as it slides down into your stomach, leaving a warm feeling behind.
Resonance: After the liquor passes your throat, it still invites reflection, and you find yourself involuntarily moving your tongue — how is there still tea in my mouth? Because the liquor is rich in substances and viscous, some residue remains in the mouth. Although small in amount, the flavor compounds within it are sufficient to reach the threshold of perception, which we call the “lingering sensation” — the tea’s resonance. What a wonderful feeling, and it lingers for quite a while. As the tea settles in your stomach, you feel warm and comfortable. In the aftertaste, the tip of your tongue is already yearning for the next sip — this is tea with deep, far-reaching resonance.
Text and images: Yiyi Pincha Tong (Young Tea Taster)
—
Author: Old Tea Head · Lin Shen (LamSam)
Zen Tea Manor ZENTEA MANOR
Tianying Supply Chain Company
www.zentea-shop.com
