Herbaceous
Dried and wild herbs, moss, and the 'medicinal' note — a band that means something specific in Chinese tea writing.
Herbaceous covers the notes that read as herbs rather than as leaves or flowers: dried thyme-and-oregano character on some aged material, the wild-herb quality attributed to high-altitude and old-bush tea, and moss on damp-stored dark tea. One entry needs a note. 'Medicinal' — yao xiang, roughly medicine fragrance — is a standard and positive descriptor for well-aged sheng pu-erh in Chinese tea writing, and it refers to the smell of a traditional pharmacy, which is to say dried roots and barks. It is not a claim that the tea does anything, and TeaHQ makes no such claim: the word describes an aroma and this record records it as an aroma and nothing else.
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 ageing is the usual route to the dried-herb and pharmacy end of the band.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-ageing. Types: type-dark-tea.
- Observed, cause unsettled
The wild-herb note attributed to high-altitude and old-bush material is widely reported and not explained. Recorded as an attribution the trade makes.
Reliably observed and not explained. Recorded as unexplained rather than given a mechanism it has not earned.
What gets said that is not right
That a tea described as medicinal is being recommended for something. The word names the smell of a herbal pharmacy and carries no claim about the drinker.
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.
dried herbs · dried root · fresh herb · herbs · medicinal herbs · moss · mountain herbs · wild herbs
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Aged Baozhong
- Aged Gong Mei
- Alishan oolong
- Bingdao sheng pu-erh
- Chen Xiang Tie Guan Yin
- Cheongtaejeon
- Cui Yu
- Krasnodar tea
- Lao Cong Shui Xian
- Shan Tuyet
- Taiwan Shan Cha
- Tie Luo Han
- Xigui sheng pu-erh
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.