Cooked greens
Steamed spinach, green beans, peas and sweet corn — the correct character of steamed Japanese green tea, and a hair's breadth from a fault.
A good sencha or gyokuro smells of steamed greens, and the comparison to spinach is close enough that it is the standard descriptor in English. The band includes green bean, pea, sweet corn and, at its sharper edge, bitter greens. It is the intended outcome of steam fixation, which cooks the leaf for a matter of seconds specifically to arrest the enzymes while keeping the leaf green. The narrow margin is the interesting part: the same character taken further, by a steamer run too long at the factory or by a drinker using water off the boil, becomes the stewed fault — dull, sulphurous and flat. Cooked greens and stewed are the same direction at two distances, which is why the second is a fault and this is not, and why the fix for one is the thing that produces the other.
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
Steam fixation, measured in seconds and specified by style. Deeper steaming pushes further into this band and further from the fresh-grass one.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-steaming. Types: type-green-tea.
- Processing step
Shading brings the savoury, soup-like character that usually accompanies these notes, which is why gyokuro reads as cooked greens plus broth where sencha reads as cooked greens plus grass.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-shading. Types: type-green-tea.
When it is a fault, and when it is not
Correct and expected in steamed Japanese green tea. A fault when it tips into dull and sulphurous, at which point it is the stewed note and has its own record.
Not to be confused with
- Stewed (Aroma) — The dull, cooked, slightly sulphurous note of green tea made with water that was too hot or left too long.
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.
bitter greens · cooked greens · fresh bean · fresh beans · fresh corn · fresh pea · fresh peas · green bean · green olive · green vegetable · light corn · soy bean · steamed greens · steamed spinach · steamed vegetable · sweet corn · sweet pea
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Anji Bai Cha
- Anji Bai Cha supreme
- Aracha
- Bai Ji Guan
- Beigang Mao Jian
- Bulang sheng pu-erh
- Chumushi sencha
- Daejak
- Duyun Mao Jian
- Enshi Yu Lu
- Fukamushicha
- Gunpowder green tea
- Guricha
- Gyokuro
- Huang Jin Ya
- Huangshan Maofeng
- Huoshan Huangya
- Jin Xuan
- Jungjak
- Junshan Yinzhen
- Kabusecha
- Kagoshima sencha
- Lao Ban Zhang sheng pu-erh
- Laoshan green tea
- Longjing
- Mao Xie
- Mecha
- Meng Ding Gan Lu
- Mizudashi sencha
- Phongsaly ancient tree tea
- Sanxia Bi Luo Chun
- Sencha
- Shincha
- Shizuoka sencha
- Tamaryokucha
- Tencha
- Uji sencha
- Wenzhou Huang Tang
- Xinyang Mao Jian
- Yame gyokuro
- Yu Lu supreme grade
- Yunnan green tea
- Zhu Ye Qing
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.