Five teas to train your palate with

Tea is a beverage that has so many different taste notes, layers, and complexities. When I was a newbie tea enthusiast, I felt overwhelmed. I knew each tea I had tasted different, but my palate just wasn’t discerning enough.

To be entirely frank, the best way to develop a strong, discerning palate is by intentionally drinking loads and loads of tea. Developing a skill takes time. But we have to start somewhere, so in today’s post, we will be recommending five teas that you can start off with.

First things first. If you are a bubble tea drinker (or boba for some of you), put that sugary beverage down. Yes, even the 0% version! (It still has some sugar in it) Sugar tastes wonderful because of evolution.

Our brains work this way:

If something tastes sweet, there is sugar.

Sugar = carbohydrates.

Carbohydrates = calories.

Calories = fuel for our body.

Fuel for our body = we can survive well.

Surviving well is important, so sweet stuff must be important.

I am not demonising sugar, though. (Sugar is good for us, excess sugar is not.) But in terms of training your palate, only having sweetened tea dulls your palate.

If you want to be discerning, you need to sacrifice that sugar for a bit. Strip the taste notes down to its bare bones.

For instance, I frequently make soy milk at home. To me, the soy milk tastes so flavourful. So super smooth and nutty and beany (in a good way!) and I could almost feel my omega-3 levels rising with every sip (hah I know I am being dramatic here).

I served the very same soy milk to my brother (who frequently enjoys store-bought, sweetened soy milk) and I promised him so hard that THIS IS THE BEST SOY MILK HE’LL EVER TASTE, only to have him go “Eh? This is tasteless…?” I only had to take one sip of his version of soy milk for the flavours in my soy milk to completely disappear.

I get that sweetness can sometimes elevate certain taste notes. That’s how food / drink pairing works after all. But for the purposes of training your palate, you do not need that elevated experience. The lesser the complexities, the better.

Your Sensory Vocabulary

If you have seen a flavour wheel before, you will see that there are so many different taste notes. Fear not! For a start, you should only focus on the few basic flavour notes:

• Astringency (a drying sensation)

• Bitterness

• Sweetness

• Umami (savoury, like seaweed)

• Grassy

Apart from these flavour notes, you can also consider noticing where you taste / sense these flavour notes in your mouth:

• Front of tongue

• Middle of tongue

• Back of tongue

• Throat

• Inner cheeks

• Entire mouth

One last thing you can do is to take note of how long each taste / sense lasts:

• When you first sip the tea

• When the tea is still in your mouth cavity

• When you first swallow the tea

• Shortly after you swallow the tea

As you can imagine, this already makes for a large number of combinations. Once you can name each independently, you have a working palate.

One Taste Note For Each Tea

These are the recommended teas that you can start with to train your palate. These teas are chosen with specific reasons in mind. Throughout this palate training process, you will definitely find teas and taste notes that you do not like. This is completely normal.

Tea 1: Young Sheng Pu-erh

Dominant taste note: Astringency

Why this tea: Young sheng pu-erh (2 - 5 years) delivers a clean, mouth-drying astringency without the bitterness of an over-extracted black tea or the funk of an aged pu-erh.

What to notice: Drink this hot. Five to ten seconds after swallowing, focus on your gums and inner cheeks. Notice the dry, almost chalky sensation (astringency). It should fade within twenty seconds or so. If this sensation lingers longer, you may have over-extracted the tea.

Brewing notes: 85°C water. Gongfu brew. Only steep 5 seconds for the first steep.
(I usually brew sheng puerhs with much hotter water. Lowered the temperature here to draw out astringent notes rather than bitter notes)

Tea 2: Unsmoked Lapsang Souchong (Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong)

Dominant taste note: Bitterness

Why this tea: People usually drink the smoked version, and I must say, this is one of the more aggressively smoky teas. The unsmoked version however, is something else entirely. It has a clean and pleasant bitterness, almost like a dark chocolate.

What to notice: The bitterness hits the back of your tongue immediately.

Brewing notes: 90°C water. Gongfu brew. 8 to 10 seconds first steep. Longer steeps may pull out astringency so keep the steeps short.

Tea 3: Yunnan Yue Guang Bai

Dominant taste note: Sweetness

Why this tea: It has a distinct fruity sweetness, similar to longans, raisins, or like the version I usually drink, red dates.

What to notice: Wait for a few seconds and you may notice the sweet notes coating your mouth.

Brewing notes: 85°C water. Western brew. 1.5 to 2 minutes first steep.

Tea 4: Gyokuro

Dominant taste note: Umami

Why this tea: The world’s cleanest umami signal. My first time having a super high quality gyokuro literally punched me in the face with umami notes.

What to notice: Umami tends to build slowly. The first sip may taste unfamiliar, but a few sips later, your entire mouth feels fuller, almost like a soup.

Brewing notes: Low temperature and take things slow. 60°C. Use a small pot or a gaiwan. No need for too much tea leaves. 60 seconds first steep. The low temperature is extremely important.

Tea 5: Huang Shan Mao Feng

Dominant taste note: Grassy

Why this tea: Many green teas are grassy, but most have layered notes (like toastiness, nuttiness, astringency). Huang Shan Mao Feng, when brewed correctly, tastes clean and grassy with minimal interference.

What to notice: Grassy notes should hit the front to mid-tongue immediately. The tea tastes green, vegetal, slightly sharp and bright, but not bitter.

Brewing notes: 80°C. 1.5 minutes for first steep.

Avoid these teas

You may not have access to the exact same teas as above. There are many other options out there, but here are some that I might avoid for this particular exercise:

• ripe pu-erh (fermented, musty notes adds noise)

• scented teas like jasmine infused green tea (floral notes interferes with your ability to pick out the dominant notes)

• smokey teas like smoked lapsang souchong

• blended teas (we want less taste notes, not more)

• tea bags (ground / broken tea leaves = risk of over extraction, tea bags also limits the amount of space for tea leaves to unfurl)

• cheap teas (generally do not taste clear, but you could try it side by side with the good quality teas next time for comparison)

How to Taste

Do not drink all five teas in one day. Your palate fatigues. Instead, drink the above teas over five different days.

What I’d like you to try is to vary the temperature of the tea.

For each tea, do the following:

• Brew 5 steeps per tea (general rule of thumb: add 15 to 30 seconds to each additional steep)

• Drink the tea immediately after pouring.

• Drink the tea 30 - 45 seconds later.

• Drink the tea after it has cooled to room temperature.

You are not looking for consistency here, you are looking for how the dominant note changes across steeps and temperature.

A Transferable Palate

The above takes maybe just 30 minutes per day. But in return, you get a more refined palate that is transferable to coffee, wine, or even foods like cheese.

Lots of people confuse bitterness with astringency. Sweetness in tea is often subtle and delayed. Instead of saying “I like this” or “I don’t like that”, you can now say “high astringency”, “low bitterness”, “no umami”, moderate grassiness”, “no sweetness”.

The more you taste, the better you become. You will not love all of the teas, but that is not the point. The point is to feel the difference before you name it.