article on tasting

Found an interesting article on tasting that I thought the group might find interesting. The article is on wine, but of course there are parallels:

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I personally am often confounded by trying to describe the taste of a particular tea, or trying to guess what a tea tastes like based on someone else's description. The idea that people taste things differently seems like common sense, but of course people want to compare their experience to others. This seems like a promising way to do so.

cha bing

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cha bing
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Yes, it's very interesting. Assuming there's scientific truth behind the article, I would think that having a palate tolerant of bitterness is pretty much required to get much pleasure out of tea. And, as the article says near the end, experience can eventually help you develop an ability to enjoy subtleties of taste that might initially be inaccessible to you.

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

Having thought about this article intermittently for a few hours, one thing that stands out is "salt suppresses bitterness".

This might explain why, when Tibetans boil, e.g., low-grade raw Pu'er for hours, they add not only milk but salt.

It might also explain something that's puzzled me for years. As far as I know, if you go far enough back in Chinese tea history, you find people decocting (not steeping) *salted* green tea. I would love to know what someone who's read the tea classics thinks about this. Danny? MarshalN?

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

The chapter on Brewing the Tea in Lu Yu's Classic of Tea says 'When the boiling water is in its first stage, you may add a measure of salt in accordance with the amount of water. You can tell when to stop by sampling it.' The true Science of Tea, everything precisely measured and specified! He never seems to say how much tea should be used per person, either! Given the amount of space devoted to describing the different kinds of froth and scum that appear as the water boils, I think he was not using the purest bottled mineral water. Black scum seems to be especially bad, he says it spoils the taste.

Certainly dried tea leaves boiled up are always sure to give a splendidly bitter drink, the salt might indeed help mitigate it slightly. Medicine is supposed to taste bad, after all. The Classic of Tea's comments on the older, popular ways of adding other ingredients also suggest that people had always tried to improve the taste: 'Sometimes such items as onion, ginger, jujube fruit, orange peel, dogwood berries or peppermint are boiled along with the tea . . . Drinks like that are no more than the swill of gutters and ditches.' Whereas today in Korea people drink teas using almost everything in that list apart from onions (and dogwood berries?), but without boiling tea along with them of course. No salt, either.

Br Anthony

Reply to
An Sonjae

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I was flipping through a book recently in a bookstore in Taipei on a report of high fluorine poisoning (fluorosis) among the tibetans caused by long term consumption of tea. The tea most tibetans used is not pu'er (not the baoyan tea from XG~), but the low grade Nan- Xi- Lubiancha, which they boil thoroughly with some salt and yak's milk. I don't think they used salt to suppress the bitterness in the tea, but to flavour the water and the gamey yak's milk. Someone once mentioned also that salt may be used also to kill bacteria, not sure how effective is that.

Adding salt to flavour tea was a practice popular during Luyu's time, tea lovers from later periods till present think it is a waste of taste and spoils the tea. In the 5th chapter of Chajing, if I remember correctly, Luyu mentions that one can add a little salt into the centre of the boiling water to flavour it to one's preference, but cautions against putting too much salt, or one would be drinking salt water, not tea.

Salt suppresses bitterness...isn't sugar a more pleasant alternative? I remember my grandparents used to make me chew a bitter leaf for my asthma, they would roll two leaves with a large pinch of salt and gave it to me. The bitterness was hellish, so I guess I'm a trained tolerant drinker...but I like riesling and dessert wines! So I'm hypersensitive drinker as well...or I'm just confused...

Bitter is a 'priced' flavour in Chinese tastebuds, usually associated with 'cooling' properties and is said to benefit the functions of the heart, spleen and liver. Tea during Luyu's time and in the Japanese tea tradition, is priced for its bitterness and gan properties; Luyu mentions that tea...whose nature is cold (han) is best for those upright in spirit...he also says that tea's character is to be bitter first, then sweet (gan). Judging from the preparation methods laid down by Luyu however, I guess he was going more for the bitter note in tea than the sweet aftertaste. The demand for hui gan comes from a much later generation of tea lovers, probably from the Ming period onwards.

Lew again: Regarding what Danny says about a "tolerant" taster enjoying less-aggressive tastes like Riesling, I think the article says this is quite normal; it just takes practice and experience. And this undoubtedly applies to tea if it's valid in the first place.

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

Here's a datum that might be relevant: many organic materials are much more soluble in ion-free water. Adding a tiny amount of ionizable inorganics can cause "salting out" of the organics, an effect very often used in purifying the results of an organic synthesis, as well as in keeping pasta from sticking together in the pot.

Salt added to water containing a lot of marginally dissolved organics, e.g. from plant decay, might knock a lot of them out into a separate phase (solid or goopy) that would settle, froth off or stick to the vessel walls. Salt might also enhance the complexation of tannins with caffeine and the like, effectively removing bitter and astringent components from solution.

Just a thought-

DM

Reply to
DogMa

Curiosity got the best of me and I added a pinch of salt to my green tea this morning. It didn't exactly improve the taste for me. It seemed to take some of the sweetness out of the tea and may have dampened the bitterness a little, but it also caused it to linger on my tongue in an unfavorable way. It took away the refreshing quality of the tea and make it heavier and more substantial tasting--like a broth perhaps.

Interestingly, I went to the Freer Gallery in DC today and they have an exhibit (one small room, actually) on japanese tea ceramics that were for the common people (i.e., not tea ceremony wares). One of the descriptions of a pot stated that it was the type in which coarse everyday tea would be made, perhaps mixed with pickles, rice or beans. I found that interesting, and thought of the breakfasts that I've eaten in China, which have been much more likely to include small pickled things than the panoply of sweets one would find in a typical american breakfast. Maybe that isn't relevant to this discussion, but it did make me consider that salted tea, like everything else, is surely a taste acquired--be it through culture or some other means.

cha bing

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cha bing

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