Berry and tropical fruit
The small band of berry, lychee, coconut and tamarind notes — uncommon, and specific.
Berry and tropical notes are rare in this catalogue and that scarcity is informative rather than a gap. Lychee is the one that recurs in the literature, attached to Oriental Beauty and to some Guangdong oolong, and it usually arrives alongside honey and muscat rather than on its own. Tamarind appears on dark teas as a sour-sweet edge. Coconut turns up occasionally on lightly roasted material. What is worth noticing is what is absent: the loud red-berry and passionfruit vocabulary that dominates coffee and wine tasting notes is almost entirely missing from unflavoured tea, and where a packet promises it, the aroma has usually been added.
Which sense this is
Aroma. Volatile compounds, smelled through the nose or retronasally while drinking. Nearly all descriptive tea vocabulary is here, including words people say they can taste.
Compound descriptor. A familiar thing used as shorthand for a mixture of sensations. Nobody detects 'chestnut' — they recognise it.
Where it comes from
- Observed, cause unsettled
Reported on particular teas and not attached to any step or compound TeaHQ can name. The lychee note on Oriental Beauty is often linked to the insect-bitten leaf that also produces its honey character, and that linkage is an association rather than a demonstrated mechanism.
Reliably observed and not explained. Recorded as unexplained rather than given a mechanism it has not earned.
Types: type-oolong-tea.
The phrases this covers
Editors write tasting notes in their own words. These are the exact phrases in the catalogue that this descriptor accounts for — the mapping is authored phrase by phrase, so nothing is grouped by a rule that guessed.
berry · coconut · dry berry · lychee · tamarind · tropical fruit
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Aged GABA oolong
- GABA oolong
- Hawaiian tea
- Lychee black tea
- Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong
- Tamaryokucha
- Wuyi Shui Xian
- Zi Juan black tea
Nearby
A tasting note is a comparison, not a measurement. Where the route from leaf to sensation is established it is labelled as such above; where it is not, the page says so rather than supplying a mechanism the descriptor has not earned. See the rest of the vocabulary for how the axes divide up.