Hay
Dried grass rather than fresh — the signature of white tea, and of green tea that has aged.
Hay is what fresh grass becomes. In white tea it is there from the start, because long withering is essentially a controlled drying of the leaf and the aroma follows the same path a cut meadow does. In green tea it is a sign of age: a sencha that has moved from cut grass to hay has been sitting, and the change is gradual enough to be a rough clock. The band runs warm and sweet at one end (warm hay, sweet hay, on aged white tea) and dry and dusty at the other (dry hay, straw), and the catalogue authors that range as modifiers, which is the same modifier-plus-head grammar that runs through the whole free-text layer. Seventeen teas use the bare string 'hay' and nine more variants sit beside it.
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
Long withering, which is most of what white tea processing consists of. Solar and trough withering both produce it, at different rates.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-withering, processing-solar-withering, processing-trough-withering. Types: type-white-tea.
- Processing step
Ageing. Green tea moves from fresh grass towards hay over months, and white tea moves from hay towards dried fruit over years.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-ageing. Types: type-white-tea, type-green-tea.
When it is a fault, and when it is not
Expected and correct in white tea and in aged white tea. A sign of staleness in a green tea that ought to smell of fresh grass, where it means the leaf has been stored too long or too warm.
Not to be confused with
- Fresh grass (Aroma) — Cut-grass green — the smell of the fresh leaf surviving into the cup, and the marker of a green tea that is actually fresh.
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.
damp straw · dried hay · dry grass · dry hay · dry straw · faint hay · fresh hay · hay · light hay · straw · sweet hay · warm hay
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Awabancha
- Azores tea
- Bai Hao Yin Zhen (Silver Needle)
- Bai Ji Guan
- Bai Mudan
- Bai Mudan Wang
- Bancha
- Batabatacha
- Beigang Mao Jian
- Burundian black tea
- Ceylon silver tips
- Charleston black tea
- Daejak
- Darjeeling first flush
- Darjeeling monsoon flush
- Darjeeling white tea
- Fu Zhuan
- Fuding Silver Needle
- Georgian black tea
- Goishicha
- Gong Mei
- Guangdong Da Ye Qing
- Gunpowder green tea
- Hand-pressed Fu Zhuan
- Hawaiian tea
- Huoshan Huang Da Cha
- Huoshan Huangya
- Jasmine Silver Needle
- Jungjak
- Junshan Yinzhen
- Karigane
- Kenyan purple tea
- Krasnodar tea
- Lankaran tea
- Magwa tea
- Mambilla tea
- Meng Ding Huang Ya
- Munnar tea
- Nepali white tea
- Pressed white tea cake
- Qing Zhuan
- Sahambavy tea
- Sayama sencha
- Sheng pu-erh (raw)
- Shou Mei
- Uda Pussellawa tea
- Vale do Ribeira tea
- Vietnamese green tea
- Wenzhou Huang Tang
- Yuan An Lu Yuan
- Zhenghe Silver Needle
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.