We often hear that "tea speaks" - the question is how do we understand it?
How to learn to taste tea?
Build a relatively fixed tea-drinking habit
Based on your taste and current conditions, fix your routine. For example, if you have a 130cc gaiwan, fix the leaf amount, the brewing method and the temperature at which you drink the liquor. Approximations are fine - no need to measure with a thermometer; pedants, please stay out.
Fixed habits remove the distracting differences of teaware and technique.
During the learning stage, stick to a few teas
Drink new raw tea this morning, black tea at noon, aged tea tonight, then white tea and oolong tomorrow... If you keep confusing yourself, how can you learn?
Pick one, two or three teas you enjoy - buy a whole cake if needed; even drinking the same tea daily is fine. Sticking to one or a few teas trains your flavor memory.
Fix your tasting vocabulary
Take aroma: my convention is orchid, orchid-like and floral-woody, and other aromas. There is no right or wrong, no high or low in such words; books on describing tea flavor are everywhere - just adopt one person's system and keep it.
With the same tea, if you say gardenia first, orchid second, cool lingering fragrance third, and something else fourth... it may all mean the same thing, but how do you compare, reinforce memory and learn?
Training flavor memory with a fixed vocabulary gives you a stable ruler for learning.
Keep your palate light
I often mention "flavor economics": simply put, wealthier regions tend toward lighter flavors. Some people, on their very first cup, taste a great deal - salivation and returning sweetness go without saying, they even catch the after-charm. I have watched such people closely: their palates are light. That is also why people in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong are willing to pay for high-end tea - they can really taste it.
A light palate begins with less oil, salt and spice. It also means avoiding icy cold drinks, barbecue and other heavy-body lifestyles.
A light palate makes your tea tasting far more sensitive - a key condition for understanding tea.
Keep your body calm
If you party every night, hit the KTV, stay up late and live loudly, your body is not calm and you cannot understand tea - even after heavy training in flavor, you will not grasp the body-feel (ti-gan).
A heavy body demands stronger tea, such as bitter Bulangshan material. A calm body can appreciate the wonder of "plain yet not bland" high-end tea - like the freshness of sashimi: a heavy body finds it bland and unsatisfying, while a calm body tastes the ingredient's true nature.
A relatively regular lifestyle and fewer bad habits keep the body calm - an essential condition for tasting tea.
Return to an appreciation of traditional culture
Learning tea - especially with me - is a process of studying traditional culture. Of course, I am a student too; the tradition is vast, and we can progress together.
Why emphasize this? Because while learning tea, I found that many answers already live in traditional culture. I will not expand here, just two examples.
1. Healthy tea
Whether tea is healthy comes down to two things: does it stimulate or calm the body, and does it make the body damp-cold. Tea that calms and does not create damp-cold is, to me, healthy tea.
Calmness you can feel through the body - easy to explain. As for damp-cold, I genuinely study with many TCM practitioners, sending them tea samples to feel and report back. Only through this kind of large-scale learning did I settle on my current selection and processing.
2. Tea as a medium between heaven and earth
I often say tea can communicate with heaven and earth. If you reject traditional culture and go fully Western, you will think I am talking nonsense.
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