The Leaves Indicate the Quality

The professional tea tasting sets are out and ready for the tasting. As you can see, the different teas of the season are all placed with numbers.

The first step of tea tasting is studying the leaves. There is much that any aspiring tea taster can learn from this. The type, grade, processing, storage, and leaf quality can all be determined by looking at the leaf. The color, size of the leaf, texture, and presence of buds (or suiro) are all noted. It is always worth looking at the dry tea for it shows the hard labor behind producing such humble-looking tea.

We first like to look at the tea and determine its quality. What we check for:
– Shape
– Size
– Uniformity
– Part of the plant (Bud or Leaf)
– Cultivar

The picked tea leaves should be in good shape, whole, and without tare (not broken). The same size and shape are very important here. We check for which cultivar the tea is (one cultivar is mostly preferred).

Most of the time we can already tell which tea will come out the winner just by the looks of it!