Tea Tasting Terms – Spare a Thought for the Tea Taster and Blender

/ / Published in Brewing, Lessons on Tea, Production, Tea

A tea taster or blender tastes many hundreds of tea samples each week. This process determines the quality of the tea and the price that it will attract. Descriptive terms used by the tea trade exist for dry leaf, infused leaf and the beverage (called liquors).

The terms are too many to mention here but generally dry leaf has about thirty descriptive terms, infused leaf about twelve and liquors about fifty. For example a sample of good Ceylon Tea can be described by the blender as black, clean and even (dry leaf), good aroma, bright and coppery (infused leaf) and good body, bright, brisk, coloury and thick (liquors)!

So the next time you have a cup of good tea remember the effort that goes into making it a good one.

Almost 40 years ago I realised that the quality of teas being imported into Australia were of poor quality. The proliferation of teabags and a pricing regime enforced by the major supermarket chains had led to a noticeable drop in quality. Elmstock Tea Company was born out of this background in 1979. I had started my working life at 17 in the Tea Plantation/Accounts Department of a large company in Colombo. My family had connections to the tea trade and prior to that coffee and sugar plantations in Ceylon since the 1840s – an unbroken and direct link of over six generations. Many of the plantations started by or managed by my great grandparents still produce some of the teas we buy today! After migrating to Australia in 1972 I graduated from Curtin University and qualified as an accountant (CPA). I worked and managed large public companies involved in the wool trade for many years and was also involved with the listing of public companies on the ASX. Elmstock have been wholesaling premium quality teas and herbal infusions sourced from the best plantations for almost 40 years. We decided over twenty five years ago not to deal with the major supermarket chains as we did not want to compromise tea quality and revert to the ‘mediocrity of the pack’ which is entirely price driven.

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