Sweet aroma of green tea

Can you tell the quality of tea by just looking and smelling those green dry leaves?  So, the other day, I attended another interesting tea-tasting workshop.  There is that kind of tasting that you can tell the difference of the quality of the tea from the good one to the bad one by smelling, feeling and physically observing 5 tea samples (You don’t actually taste the brewed tea).

We had a fruitful lecture before the actual tasting.  The teacher said that good tea possess sweet aroma.  So this time I paid attention about the odor and wandered for the sweet aroma in the samples.  What was interesting about it was that I found out the second-best tea has the most bold sweetness.  Well of course, the first-best tea also had a sweet odor.  Furthermore, the fourth tea had a sweet smell as well.  Interesting, wouldn’t you think?  They are all sweet but the quality of the sweetness varies.  The first-best one had a fresh fragrance with a green note which comes from the natural quality of tea.   The second and fourth ones had the sweetness with roasted flavor that is reminiscent of corn. 

The roasted flavor is called “hika” which is added by roasting the leaves at the final producing process.  Hika literally means fire aroma.  It improves the flavor of tea by giving more profound caramelic flavor and cornish aroma.  You may not find hika on high quality teas, but you often find it on ordinary teas. 

I gave the correct answer in this tasting practice.  I kind of relied on the appearance rather than the aroma, though.  I think improving smelling skills are quite challenging because memorizing the smell is not easy.  You cannot lean it by reading so you have to experience it on your own.  I could find the difference on the sweet aroma between the second and forth tea, but I’m not sure if I can remember the difference next time.  I definitely need more practice on smelling, hahaha.  If you have a chance to smell some different leaves, try to look for the sweet aroma and find out the difference of the sweetness.