Citrus
Peel and zest rather than juice — the high, sharp band, and the one most often added from outside the leaf.
Tea's citrus character is almost always peel or zest rather than fruit: it reads as aromatic and slightly bitter rather than sour, which is why the catalogue's strings are overwhelmingly 'citrus peel', 'citrus zest', 'orange peel' and 'grapefruit peel' rather than the fruits themselves. It appears intrinsically on brisk first-flush black teas and on some high-mountain oolong. It also arrives from outside the leaf in two quite different ways that are worth telling apart. Bergamot in Earl Grey is a flavouring, added as oil. Citrus-stuffed pu-erh, where the leaf is packed into a hollowed mandarin peel and dried, is a production method in its own right and the peel is part of the finished object. The first is a flavoured tea; the second is a tea and a fruit sold together, and the difference shows in how they are brewed.
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
- Processing step
Citrus peel stuffing puts the leaf inside a dried mandarin, so the peel contributes directly. This is a production method rather than a flavouring.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: processing-citrus-stuffing. Types: type-dark-tea.
- Processing step
Bergamot in Earl Grey is oil added to finished tea. Where the catalogue records bergamot on an unflavoured tea, it is a comparison rather than an ingredient.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Types: type-black-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Sourness (Taste) — A taste that is usually a fault in tea, and occasionally a producer's intention.
What gets said that is not right
That a citrus note means acidity. Peel and zest are aromatic and slightly bitter; a tea that is actually sour is usually reporting a storage or processing fault.
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.
bergamot · brisk citrus · citrus · citrus peel · citrus zest · dried citrus · dried orange · grapefruit peel · green mandarin peel · lemon · lemon peel · light bergamot · light citrus · orange peel
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Afternoon blend
- Asamushi sencha
- Ceylon black tea
- Ceylon silver tips
- Chuan Hong Gongfu
- Cream Earl Grey
- Darjeeling first flush
- Dimbula
- Dooars and Terai
- Earl Grey
- English Breakfast
- Georgian black tea
- Guricha
- Java black tea
- Kagoshima sencha
- Kandy tea
- Kenyan purple tea
- Krasnodar tea
- Lady Grey
- Lahijan tea
- Lankaran tea
- Malawi black tea
- Munnar tea
- Nilgiri frost tea
- Nuwara Eliya
- Rwandan orthodox black
- Sencha
- Tamaryokucha
- Uda Pussellawa tea
- Uva
- Xiao Qing Gan
- Ya Shi Xiang Dan Cong
- Yongchun Fo Shou
- You Hua Xiang
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.