This is the 32nd article of my "Talking About Tea on Paper" series. Click for more Talking About Tea on Paper articles.
This article is pure experience - my personal feeling and understanding, no data. "Scientific tea drinkers" may exit now!
Tea that feels good in the body should taste comfortable, run smoothly through the body, and linger long in the aftertaste.
Often when I drink tea I hardly attend to the mouthfeel; I feel the tea as a whole. Frequently, when tasting with friends and agreeing the tea is good, only when asked "how is the taste?" do I then focus on sweetness, astringency, salivation and returning sweetness. That overall feeling is what I call the "picture". I first mentioned the picture in 2016 in "Talking About Tea on Paper, No. 14: Ten Indicators of Aged Ripe Pu-erh from Ancient Trees"; today I extend it.
Moss on tea trees
1. The picture.
The picture is the overall feeling a tea gives us. Like a young man who sees a girl and falls in love at first sight - he may not even know her name, having passed her on the street once, yet he has already imagined dating, marrying her, even their children's names. Ask him what she looks like: "beautiful." Ask for details: he cannot say, just beautiful. Ask her habits, where she is from, her hobbies - he knows nothing. He simply likes her. Love at first sight that derails a life - the ultimate beauty of this world.
Tea is the same.
When I drink tea, I mainly drink the picture. Tea with a good picture never tastes badly; tea with a poor picture - even if the mouthfeel is decent - fails in body-feel, and some fail in both. I have always believed only tea with a good picture deserves drinking, and for those of us making mid-to-high-end tea, only such tea deserves attention.
When I cup teas, I often pour out after one brew; some think I am being mysterious - the first steep has not even shown its flavors. In fact I am drinking the picture; one steep is enough. The mouthfeel may change later, but if the picture is poor from the start, further steeps hold no promise.
This overall feeling requires a calm body - tea speaks, but only if you can hear it. For a calm body, see my 2022 video "How to Truly Taste Tea? Advanced". Besides a calm body, you must empty yourself: do not deliberately focus on taste, forget the tea knowledge you learned, forget the damned jargon, and feel the tea with an empty, airy mind. Have you noticed that children taste tea very accurately? Because their bodies are calm and they know nothing about tea - they only care whether it is good. Good or not good is the most basic picture.
At this point contrarians raise objections: then what about the professionals, and the graceful tea artists - did they learn all that tea knowledge for nothing? No! Learning tea is itself a process of going from one to ten thousand and back from ten thousand to one. If you cannot come back to the one, I think you still need to study more - there is huge room to improve. I have seen people who made tea for decades yet still could not taste it. Grinding on is useless; instead empty yourself, travel more, pause your tea research for a while, sleep well and eat simply - perhaps one day it clicks. That is how I realized it!
Actually, many people have pictures. Tea with a smoky note tastes like cured meat; unclean tea can taste like pig slop; people often say this tea makes them unhappy, that one tastes like first love - these are the plainest pictures. Forget the professional knowledge; let us perceive tea with our bodies and seek the beauty (or ugliness) of that first moment on the tongue.
Let me describe my own pictures. The good ones: like a spring breeze; like walking in a primeval forest and eating ginseng fruit, every pore opening; cool, as if drizzle fell on a scorching noon; crisp and sweet as a mountain stream found when tired and thirsty after chopping wood as a child, cupped and drunk - that piercing coolness with a thread of sweetness; this tea relieves stress; this tea eases the heart; this tea is like aged wine; this tea tastes like mother's cooking - and so on. The bad ones are probably the same for all of us: pig slop, entering a landfill, dust, cheap perfume...
2. Quenching thirst.
Tea is first a beverage - a substitute for water. Veteran tea obsessives, please remember this sentence:
Tea is water, but it cannot fully replace water.
Besides tea, we should still drink plenty of water - boiled, mineral or purified.
Since it substitutes for water, thirst-quenching is a necessary condition. Sadly, many teas do not quench thirst - some even make you thirstier. Stay away from teas you cannot drink comfortably, teas that leave you thirsty.
We do not need others to teach us how to drink tea; a tea that quenches thirst is basically enough.
Only after thirst is settled is it worth attending to the rest of the tea.
3. Mouthfeel.
I have made several videos about mouthfeel; this article will not expand on it, just record it briefly for completeness.
1. Aroma.
There are three kinds of aroma: aroma floating in the air is worth little, cup aroma also little - only aroma in the liquor counts. Some teas smell wonderful when brewed, yet on entry are rubbish. Any tea of passable quality has good cup aroma, so cup aroma has no reference value. Liquor aroma - fragrance entering the water - when you hold the liquor in your mouth, waves of subtle fragrance fill the mouth and penetrate body and heart. Only liquor aroma is king. Floating and cup aroma fade fast; liquor aroma endures.
Fine versus coarse aroma. A lingering, delicate aroma is best; nose-punching is second-rate. Fine aroma is faint, subtle, present yet barely present, like being wrapped in the pull of a hot romance; bad aroma is strong and blunt, like cheap perfume that tickles your nose into sneezes - a woman at the east end of the village wears it and it stings at the west end. Fine aroma is like floral-fruity; coarse aroma is like essence-flavor. A good tea should excel in all three kinds; I have yet to meet a tea with good liquor aroma but poor floating and cup aromas.
2. Sweetness.
Clean sweetness is the entry level; sweetness reaching crisp mineral coolness is the highest realm. This is one main reason Yiwu and Bingdao teas are so loved: they begin with clean sweetness and peak in crispness. Clean sweetness grows more attractive with every cup; cloying sweetness is hard to swallow. Good tea should be clean-sweet, even crisp.
Sweetness is easy to understand: most natural fruit sweetness is clean, while maltose or birthday-cake sweetness mostly is not. As for sweet-to-the-point-of-crisp: buy a few bottles of natural mineral water, sip carefully, and look for that elusive crispness with an almost absent sweetness.
3. Flavor.
Clean flavor matters most; only strict process control and careful material selection can yield clean tea. Unclean tea can only give a poor picture.
Good tea should have complete flavor and a complete mouthfeel, with throat charm. Incomplete, hollow teas tend to make you thirstier as you drink.
Good tea's liquor should behave like a gentleman - warm and smooth as jade. Moisture is not merely thickness; it is fullness and density. Thin, watery liquor pleases no one.
The liquor should be soft - that is what we mean by tea's soft power. The hardest things are not cut by diamonds but by water. Soft, moist liquor accords with the way of wellness; only such tea can be drunk generously.
Entrance: faint fragrance and clean sweetness. Held: full-bodied with good salivation and returning sweetness. Lingering: endless aftertaste. All three stages in one - that is good tea.
4. Charm (yun).
Rock tea speaks of cong-flavor, pu-erh of wild mountain charm - they mean the same thing: charm.
Good tea is always full of charm: wild flavors you can actually taste, flavors of nature itself. That is what it is about.
Free-range chicken is far more fragrant than market broiler chicken - the extra is mainly charm.
Tea rich in charm must come from good ecology. Of course, ecology is not only free-ranging; sensible organic fertilizer and pest control can also produce tea full of charm.
5. Liveliness (huo).
"Fragrance, sweetness, flavor, charm, liveliness" - these are my five indicators for evaluating tea. See: https://laolv.org/LCPF.html.
I will write about liveliness separately - the next article, "Tea That Feels Good in Your Body - Body-Feel".
4. Summary.
Good tea usually has no obvious weak point: fragrance, sweetness, flavor, charm and liveliness should all be excellent. It needs no professional tea artist to brew, no lowered water temperature; however fast or slow you pour, it should taste good.
Learn to drink tea with your mouth. Do not assume a tea tastes good because the price is high, it is a celebrity's work, or it comes from a famous mountain - that is drinking with your eyes and ears, not your mouth.
Everyone has the ability to judge tea. Trust yourself. Some discussion and exchange is useful, of course, but no matter what others say, if you feel a tea is uncomfortable, hold firm to your feeling - stay away from that tea, and even from that person (or company).
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