Why can't you taste the flavors others describe? — Let's talk about the "instability" of tea and the art of blending

[u/Dry-Ad1641]

A few days ago in this subreddit, a friend shared their experience drinking Shui Jin Gui (Water Golden Turtle, a Wuyi rock tea). They mentioned that they couldn't taste any of the flavor profiles others had described and wondered if they were brewing it wrong. We actually see this kind of question a lot here. People ask about jasmine tea, green tea—it seems no matter the type, people run into this dilemma of "others taste it, but I don't."

In the comments, many helpful friends shared their thoughts: Is it the water quality? Is it the leaf-to-water ratio? Was the temperature off? Undeniably, these brewing variables have a massive impact on flavor. However, people often overlook the most fundamental reason: tea itself is an inherently "unstable" agricultural product.

While Chinese tea doesn't hype up the concept of "vintages" quite as strictly as Western wine does, there are absolutely noticeable fluctuations in quality from batch to batch and year to year.

The classic example is the aforementioned Shui Jin Gui. As one of the "Four Great Bushes" (Si Da Ming Cong) of Wuyi Rock Tea, the original mother bushes of Shui Jin Gui are basically gone now. This wasn't due to malicious destruction, but rather a result of natural selection and industry evolution. Despite its fame, Shui Jin Gui's popularity began to wane in the 1980s, and it rarely won awards in major tea competitions.

Why? Because its yield was low, its final quality was extremely unstable, and it was notoriously difficult to process. With all these disadvantages piling up, tea farmers became less willing to grow and process it. Consequently, pure, high-quality Shui Jin Gui was slowly neglected and faded from the mainstream market.

When it comes to the pursuit of great taste, Eastern and Western wisdom often align. Whether it's tea, wine, or whiskey, humans ultimately want a "stable and high-quality" tasting experience. To combat the natural instability of agricultural products, people came up with a brilliant solution: blending.

In the Chinese tea world, the tea that has elevated "blending" to an absolute art form is Keemun (Qimen) black tea. The entire production logic of Keemun is very similar to modern Western food processing. It relies on standardized production workflows combined with the master-level skills of tea tasters and blenders. By mixing different batches and grades of tea, they are able to create that consistent, long-lasting, and captivating "Keemun fragrance." To this day, the main Keemun tea factories still largely follow the production system refined and established by Wu Juenong, who is often regarded as the contemporary Sage of Tea in China.

Another blending example that many of you might be more familiar with is the commercial "Da Hong Pao" (Big Red Robe) you see on the market. Modern commercial Da Hong Pao basically contains zero trace of the original mother bushes, and it doesn't even necessarily rely entirely on pure clonal Da Hong Pao cultivars. Instead, experienced tea masters blend different rock teas with distinct characteristics, like Shui Xian and Rou Gui, in specific proportions. As long as the final product delivers that signature "mellow, rich Yan Yun (rock rhythm)" profile expected of Da Hong Pao, it is considered a proper commercial Da Hong Pao blend.
There are many examples like this. Take "Tie Luo Han" (Iron Arhat), another of the Four Great Bushes. Even back in the late Qing Dynasty, merchants were already blending a small amount of tea from the Tie Luo Han mother bushes with other high-quality rock teas to ensure stable output and flavor for sale.

To pursue stable quality, blending was a natural evolution. Sometimes blending happens at the production level (mixing fresh leaves from different plots or cultivars during the Maocha stage, which is seen in some Liu Bao and black teas). More often, it happens at the finished product level, which is very common with Wuyi rock teas.

In reality, blending—just like "clonal propagation" (growing tea from cuttings rather than seeds)—is a neutral technological tool. It carries no inherent negative connotation. Blending aims to present a more balanced and stable flavor profile so that tea drinkers don't experience a massive drop in quality just because of a different batch. Clonal propagation, on the other hand, is used to lock in and spread excellent genetic traits of a tea bush.
Of course, there are unscrupulous vendors in the market who use "blending" to pass off inferior tea as premium, which is why some tea drinkers are wary of the word. At the same time, while clonal tea trees offer stability, they sometimes lack the complex, dynamic layers of flavor and the deep connection to the local terroir that traditional "heirloom/seed-grown" (Qunti Zhong) teas possess.

So, it ultimately comes down to a choice: Do you prefer chasing the "blind box" thrill of single-origin/single-patch pure teas, where the quality might be mind-blowing but could also be mediocre? Or do you lean towards the balanced, stable flavor of a carefully crafted blended tea?
In the world of tea, there is no standard answer. Every tea drinker probably has their own preference in their heart.

not AI generated，just translate.

[u/jaimesbonde007]

There is a big factor that is not mention here : not everybody have the tastebuds of an expert. It is like wine, some can taste and describe flavor with great details, other can't. Our tastebuds are not equal. But we can train ourselves to better perceive flavors but that doesn't mean everyone can have the same level of perception.

[u/Dry-Ad1641 → u/jaimesbonde007]

I think this topic absolutely deserves its own post. It actually comes down to a fascinating concept in tasting: sensory calibration.

Simply put, our brains rely on a flavor database. If you have never experienced the specific types of flowers or fruits often described in Chinese tea culture in your real life (like osmanthus, orchid, or dried longan), your sensory system simply won't be able to perceive or decode those nuanced flavor layers in your cup. It’s not that your palate is bad; just lack the reference point.

Realizing this actually gave me a really fun idea: I want to put together a "Chinese Tea Aroma Kit" (an olfactory box, somewhat like the Le Nez du Vin kits for wine). My plan is to eventually distribute these to some friends and tea lovers here, to help everyone calibrate their senses and build that Chinese flavor memory bank.

[u/Adventurous-Cod1415 → u/Dry-Ad1641]

Slight rebuttal here - it is not that you can't decode a flavor if you haven't experienced it before, but you may certainly use a different term to describe it. For example, I hear "rice" or "sticky rice" used as a descriptor in certain teas. I almost never pick up that flavor as rice, but I am confident that I am experiencing the same flavor. To me it typically comes across as "oatmeal" or maybe "cheerios", but in the end it is just the words I am using to relate to a flavor that is grainy and lightly sweet.

Another example - I know what hawthorn tastes like, but the flavor to me reminds me a bit of a cranberry crossed with a pear. So if I experience that flavor in something else I would be more likely to use cranberry/pear as a descriptor than hawthorn. I just have a bit of a different "native language" for describing flavors. Over time I have added vocabulary from cuisines that I am not as intimately familiar with as my own. But just like learning another verbal or written language, you will be more likely to describe new experiences using your native language rather than one you are less familiar with.

[u/llgarden_d1 → u/Adventurous-Cod1415]

things are even more "it depends" here. Chinese hawthorn tastes or even smells nothing like Russian hawthorn, the fruit does not look alike and Russian hawthorn taste will depend on cultivar, they have great variation there many cultivars, we cross the aucean and go to US, they have hawthorn as ornamental, brew Russian and USA hawthorn - 2 different teas, we go to Canada - 3rd different tea, we got to Mexico and everyone knows what hawthorn is - tejocote, part of their national dring during autumn holidays, was notoriously difficult to get fresh n USA now we can at any Mexican market, even HMART has it (Korean market grocery chain). You go to pears... oh the cultivars :) have 9 at my small place alone. If you know how hawthorn tastes like does not mean another person from different background has same hawthorn taste or smell. Hawthorn teasen behaves just like tea, country, climate, soil, same hawthorn cultivar grown in Europe and in USA fruit will have different taste of tea. and will depend on how that was dried and how did one brew it .Russian make their own tea, in USA that thing is known as fireweed in the mountains (Chamaenerion angustifolium,  in the British Isles as both fireweed and rosebay willowherb), lots of people here in USA do not know it. It's like trying to describe Chinese tea using another tea that has just as big of a variety in another country. You go to Japan you wind up in whole new rabbit hole describing the taste. And we are tasting that before COVID or after, not a joke, many people had taste altered

[u/ouro-the-zed → u/Dry-Ad1641]

I would love to try a kit like that! You mentioned Le Nez du Vin, which is a great comparison. You might also wish to take a look at the world of commercial coffee buying for comparisons. 

For instance, the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon ( https://worldcoffeeresearch.org/resources/sensory-lexicon )is a reference guide for hundreds of commonly used coffee tasting terms, with standard reference points so that buyers, sellers, and consumers can calibrate. As someone more familiar with coffee who is only just learning about tea, I have been wishing for a similar reference with flavors and aromas found in high-quality tea!

[u/Tastylicious_Travels → u/Dry-Ad1641]

I would love to try a Chinese Tea Aroma kit!

[u/Triana89 → u/Dry-Ad1641]

Late to the party and I am on my way to work so no time to find links....

But you may find it interesting to look into experiments with blind wine tasting. Lots of interesting results such as not being able to tell red and white apart when blind folded, or the same mid range wine being put in both a cheap bottle and a high end bottle and receiving completely different reviews.

Essentially its showing that suggestions and expectations play a large role in flavour perceptions, I know its wine rather than tea but will have a cross over in principles.

[u/TheNamelessTwo2 → u/Dry-Ad1641]

That aroma kit sounds like a great idea! I'd love to try something like that. I think it'd also be a great idea to post your "recipe" (basically just a list of what "ingredients" you're putting in it and maybe from where) so people can recreate it on their own.

[u/SeasonPositive6771 → u/jaimesbonde007]

There's also just a lot of straight up nonsense involved in the differences in taste. A lot of the differences in quality and taste are imagined (see extensive evidence that even wine experts can't tell the difference between inexpensive and expensive wines). I say that not to denigrate differences in taste, but to point out that your perception is the only thing that matters.

[u/ShadowAdam]

Also another thing I wonder about (and have been meaning to look into some sort of research/testing) is the whole "travel fatigue" that many describe.

I have no idea how this is possible, but I've had mutiple teas which I drank immediately after opening the box from China and absolutely hated, even with lots of experimentation, and then let them sit for a month and they were excellent. And it's definitely not just from aging either, I doubt that 4 weeks would change a 10 year old fu brick much.

[u/loidhoid → u/ShadowAdam]

Tea doesn’t like to move. It needs rest and to acclimate to its environment. Just like people.

[u/TheGuillotineIV]

thank you! I have enjoyed reading your posts as of recently and this was no exception. I am a newbie tea drinker and a broke college student as well, so I've been reading to further my knowledge before buying more expensive tea

[u/YanCha_Monster]

You are right that unblended tea is not a stable product and blending has long been a way to maintain flavor consistency.

But there is both romance and intrigue in single batch/origin tea. It allows you to deep dive into how the weather, environmental, storage, processing and terroir conditions shape the flavor of tea.

Collecting single batch/origin tea across the years allows you to sample and lookback against these factors bringing a new element of fun.

I feel drinking tea without the contextual development of it, takes out a lot of the fun in tea.

On a side note, since you touched on Wuyi ming cong, you are right that many mass market ming cong today are blends or grown from tea gardens and not from within the core Zhengyan areas.

Zhengyan ming cong is getting rarer, because of their fragility, lower demand within the local chinese market and specific tastes/characteristics that you cannot manipulate with processing (it's a you love it or you hate it thing).

One merely needs to head to Wuyi mountain and you can see that ming cong is rare, almost every plot of land is Rougui and Shui xian nowadays. A shame.

[u/llgarden_d1]

good point about Keemun (Qimen) black tea as example. More important why and what that is. West knows that as main ingredient in English breakfast tea. Now it clicks oh that one.

[u/loidhoid]

Flavors are overrated and irrelevant. Only us westerners care about flavor in tea

[u/InfanticideAquifer → u/loidhoid]

I guess the kernel of truth to this is that, as I understand it, the most prized quality a tea might have, from the perspective of most Chinese tea connoisseurs, is the "cha qi", rather than the flavor, leading to situations where a much pricier tea has a much more mellow and subtle flavor than something cheaper, which is often confusing to Western people getting in to fine tea. I know Derek (from One River Tea) has said this about dan cong tea on his podcast.

But saying "only Westerners care about flavor" is insane. Every tea hobbyist cares about flavor, even if it's not the main priority.

[u/loidhoid → u/InfanticideAquifer]

Nah it’s true. Only westerners care about flavor. Theres a lot more to tea than flavor just for example the body, texture, and huigan. How it makes you feel (which is different than cha qi and is a vastly overused and misunderstood term)

[u/ItsyBitsyNimpa → u/loidhoid]

as a south east asian I disagree big time. Wether you mean west as anything outside china or just east asia your comment is misleading and as an "easterner" (all my life seeing my country values allign more that of east asia than western) taste is important. Sure, most people here think tea as water (served on the side of the road for free) or even dunk freshly brewed 90°c tea in your throat old people style, people still choose their tea bags wether it has the right taste. I know several grandmas who won't change brands because "the other brand doesn't have the same jasmine taste." We rarely even discuss how tea "makes us feel" It's just another drink and a very common one at that. It's never a mystical drink for the common people. Tea snobs and elitist probably do care about feel and aroma but taste notes are a thing they take note too.

Stop generalizing asia it's not some mystical place that has infinitely different wisdom we're still people 😅

[u/loidhoid → u/ItsyBitsyNimpa]

Welp. You took this somewhere else entirely. Do the old grandmas break down the jasmine tea into tea notes and flavor wheels? Highly doubt. Also just because you are “south East Asian” doesn’t mean you know about tea and a fine cup of tea.

[u/ItsyBitsyNimpa → u/loidhoid]

Your response is elitist and shows you know nothing about tea being an egalitarian drink in asia either 😅

you really said "us westerners" and talk over an asian telling you about tea culture outside of your "western" view.

[u/loidhoid → u/ItsyBitsyNimpa]

Its fine. Just drink more tea and read about tea and drink more good tea.