How to Choose Tea
How to Choose Tea
When purchasing tea, one primarily judges authenticity, freshness, and quality through four aspects: appearance, aroma, taste, and shape. Different tea varieties have distinct standards for these attributes. General consumers should assess tea through sight, smell, and taste.
1. Looking: This is a crucial method. Use your eyes to visually inspect the tea’s appearance and color. Specifically, examine the tightness, uniformity, cleanliness, maturity, and hue of the tea leaves. Generally, green tea is best when finely curled and neat; pearl tea is optimal when round and compact; flat teas like Longjing are ideal when smooth, flat, even, and clean. Regarding color, green tea is superior when emerald or lustrous green, dull yellow being inferior. For black tea, Gongfu tea is best when tightly knotted, red broken tea when fine, uniform, and clean. Color-wise, dark lustrous is best, dull red being inferior. Flower tea is best when tightly curled; color-wise, deep green without shine is ideal, gray-green with shine being second. Overall, regardless of type, tightly packed, heavy, round, and uniformly sized tea leaves are preferable; loose, light, fragmented ones are inferior.
2. Smelling: This uses olfactory judgment to assess tea quality. There are two methods: smelling the dry tea and smelling the brewed tea. Directly smelling dry tea reveals whether it has fragrance or off-odors. Fragrant tea is good; lack of fragrance or presence of odd smells indicates poor quality. For detailed evaluation, brew the tea and smell the aroma released by the infusion. High-quality tea releases diverse fragrances—orchid, chestnut, rose, fresh, strong, or fresh scents. Generally, green tea is best with a fresh aroma, stale or grassy notes being inferior; black tea is best with strong, pure, sweet fragrance, sour or fermented odors being inferior; oolong tea is best with rich, subtle fragrance; flower tea should combine green tea’s freshness with floral fragrance. Pure floral scent without fragrance indicates insufficient flowers; floral scent with weak tea flavor suggests excess flowers overpowering tea. Only when floral fragrance complements tea aroma is it considered top-grade. Regardless of tea type, always check for off-odors first—smoke, pesticide, or other unpleasant smells indicate contamination and should be avoided, as they may harm health.
3. Tasting: This involves tasting the tea directly via the sense of taste. Brewed tea exhibits different flavors—bitter, astringent, sour, bland, fresh, strong, sweet, or mellow—allowing differentiation of tea quality. Generally, green tea is best when fresh and mellow; black tea when sweet and rich; oolong tea when sweet and crisp; flower tea when fresh and palatable. Any tea lacking flavor or having coarse, astringent, or strange tastes is of poor quality.
Combining sight, smell, and taste provides a comprehensive assessment for selecting truly high-quality tea.