Brothiness
The soup-like weight of a high-amino-acid green tea — a mouthfeel, and the companion of umami rather than the same thing.
A well-made gyokuro does not feel like a hot drink so much as like a small quantity of stock. The liquor is dense, slightly viscous, and coats the mouth in a way that ordinary green tea does not. English-speaking tasters usually reach for 'broth' or 'dashi', and the comparison is apt, because both are amino-acid-rich liquids with the same kind of weight. Recording it as a mouthfeel keeps it separate from the umami taste it usually arrives with and from the marine aroma that usually arrives with both. That separation is doing work: a shaded sencha can carry the savoury taste with a much lighter texture, and describing the two teas requires being able to say so.
Which sense this is
Mouthfeel. Felt rather than tasted or smelled: texture, weight, viscosity, and the drying grip of astringency, which is a physical effect in the mouth rather than a flavour.
Tactile, not gustatory. The taste that accompanies it is umami and has its own record; treating them as one word is what makes shaded Japanese greens hard to tell apart in writing.
Compound descriptor. A familiar thing used as shorthand for a mixture of sensations. Nobody detects 'chestnut' — they recognise it.
Where it comes from
- Processing step
Shading before plucking, followed by low-temperature brewing, is the standard route. Both raise the amino acid contribution relative to the catechin one.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-shading. Types: type-green-tea.
- Brewing variable
A high leaf-to-water ratio at low temperature and a short steep concentrates the effect; it is why gyokuro is brewed with a great deal of leaf in very little water.
Produced at the drinker's end, by a brewing choice or a brewing error.
Types: type-green-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Umami (Taste) — The savoury taste that Japanese green tea is built around, and that Western flavour wheels leave out.
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.
sweet broth
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Yame gyokuro
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.