- Mar 24, 2019
- Alex Troop
- 0 comments
Once the process of manufacturing a batch of tea gets completed, there comes the essential part where a professional tea taster rates the product. Now when it comes to tea, tasting is both the most important as well as the most irrelevant. As taste varies from person to person, one person may feel the tea is good another might not rate it so high. This is where the job of a professional tea taster comes into play. A person can become an excellent tea taster only through years of, and there is no other shortcut to it.
A quality taster with just one sip can evaluate the tea's freshness, cleanliness, manufacturing process, the condition of the storage unit and many more. A tea gets evaluated based on three grounds, and they are color, aroma and finally the taste. To become a professional taster in commodity tea arena is not everyone's cup of tea as small changes in the storage or manufacturing process may massively change the taste of the final product though both the leaves coming from the same plantation. It is impossible for anyone to evaluate when exposed to such a massive spectrum of taste.
Currently, in India, no professional taster can claim to be an expert in more than a few different teas. The reason for such inconvenience is the failure to build a baseline for tea taster learning making it very hard for them to become an expert. As a result, even with years of experience, they can identify only a handful of them.
The most experienced tea taster will say that tea will never taste the same for more than once. This is down more of scientific reason rather than experience. As we know, the taste of tea may become subject to change if parameters like temperature, pressure and humidity changes. The person who tastes the beverage will remain in a constant state of flux. The tea polyphenols bonds strongly with some molecules and this bonding continues in our mouth as well. The polyphenols can bond with minerals and particles of caffeine making it very hard to repeat the entire process; as a result, the tea tastes different every time.
Keeping all these factors in mind, experiences tasters often build a median in their mind, and they refer that taste median to judge a product and also discover new features of the particular tea which they previously.