Cocoa
Dry cocoa powder rather than chocolate bar — a marker of Yunnan black tea and of some well-aged shou.
The cocoa note in tea is specifically unsweetened: dry, slightly bitter, powdery, closer to cocoa powder or high-percentage dark chocolate than to anything with sugar or milk in it. It appears most reliably on Yunnan black tea, often alongside the sweet potato note, and on shou pu-erh that has been aged past its rough early years. Twenty-one teas here carry it. It is worth distinguishing from the malt band it is often paired with: malt is grain-sweet and cereal, cocoa is dry and slightly bitter, and a tea can be strongly one and not the other even though Assam and Dian Hong frequently have both.
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
Full oxidation of large-leaf material, and separately the long ageing of wet-piled dark tea. Two different routes arriving at a similar description.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-oxidation, process-wet-piling, process-ageing. Types: type-black-tea, type-dark-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Malt (Aroma) — The defining note of Assam and of orthodox black tea — and the descriptor with more surface spellings in this catalogue than any other.
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.
cocoa · dark chocolate · light cocoa
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Assam
- Assam golden tips
- Assam second flush
- Bailin Gongfu
- Da Hong Pao
- Dian Hong
- Golden Monkey
- Golden Needle
- Gong Ting shou pu-erh
- Jin Jun Mei
- Keemun
- Keemun Hao Ya
- Lao Cha Tou
- Light-fermented shou pu-erh
- Matcha
- Menghai shou pu-erh
- Ning Hong
- Russian Caravan
- Shou pu-erh (ripe)
- Sun Moon Lake Assam
- Tanyang Jin Hao
- Yingde Hong
- Yunnan Golden Bud
- Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong (unsmoked)
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.