English-language tea taster's terms

[mbanu]

When an old tea-author says a tea is "hungry", what do they mean, exactly?

I would say this should be connected to the "Moaning about Moning" thread, but a lot of these terms are still in use today, as listed in this helpful pamphlet by the Bureau of Indian Standards: https://archive.org/details/gov.in.is.4 ... 3/mode/2up

I also think it's intriguing how the terms relate to one another. For example, C.R. Harler mentioned, "The terms dry, bakey, high-fired and burnt denote degrees of the same fault in ascending order of undesirability. The expression malty denotes a desirable quality, and this is also probably the result of a touch of the fire.", meaning that these aren't synonyms for the same thing, but terms with a technical meaning related to degree of firing off-flavors.

I thought it might be fun to talk about.

[mbanu]

Some slightly helpful advice on "briskness", from a 1955 article by J.M. Trinick.

While he seems a bit at a loss over how to describe briskness generally, I think the key point for me is that briskness is not a flavor but a category of flavors similar to firing flavors, with pungent on the one end and soft on the other. So all tea can be described through its briskness, with a soft tea having none. It sounds like cooked pu'er would qualify as an Assamica tea having a soft flavor, compared to the pungent flavor of a fresh Assam.

I also quite liked the mention in the Bureau of Indian Standards pamphlet that "wild", "winey", and "fruity" all describe the same age-related flavor change in different degrees, which I had not heard before, as well as the distinction between "chesty" and "woody", with woody meaning a flavor naturally within the tea and chesty meaning a flavor picked up through storage conditions, which seems like it might be helpful for describing certain quirks of pu'er and other aged teas.