Honey
The most-used note in the catalogue by a wide margin, and in one famous case a note with a named referent.
Honey is used across every category of tea here, which makes it the least discriminating descriptor in the vocabulary and also the most necessary. It spans a lot of ground: the light nectar of a fresh white tea, the deep dark-honey character of an aged one, and the thick honeyed quality of Oriental Beauty and of good Fujian black tea. Mi xiang, honey fragrance, is a standard Chinese descriptor and in one context it has a specific referent. Oriental Beauty and the Taiwanese teas sold as mi xiang are made from leaf that has been fed on by the tea green leafhopper; the plant's response to that feeding is credited with the honey character, and producers manage their gardens to encourage it, which is unusual enough to be worth stating. That is a trade practice built on an association, and the route from insect damage to aroma is not something TeaHQ can state as established.
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
- Observed, cause unsettled
In Oriental Beauty and the Taiwanese mi xiang teas, the honey character is credited to leafhopper feeding damage before plucking, and gardens are managed to encourage it. The association is acted on commercially; the mechanism is not established.
Reliably observed and not explained. Recorded as unexplained rather than given a mechanism it has not earned.
Types: type-oolong-tea, type-black-tea.
- Processing step
Elsewhere it follows oxidation and, in white tea, long withering and age. It is not one note with one cause — it is a band that several routes arrive at.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-oxidation, process-withering, process-ageing.
Not to be confused with
- Sweetness (Taste) — A taste, and in tea usually a faint one — most of what reads as sweet is aroma.
What gets said that is not right
That a honey note means honey was added, or that the tea is sweet in the sense of containing sugar. It is an aroma, and the sweetness a drinker reports from it is mostly the nose informing the tongue.
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.
beeswax · dark honey · honey · light honey · warm honey
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Aged Shou Mei
- Aged white tea cake
- Assam clonal
- Assam golden tips
- Bai Mudan
- Bai Mudan Wang
- Bailin Gongfu
- Bailin Jin Hao
- Balhyocha
- Bi Tan Piao Xue
- Ceylon silver tips
- Chuan Hong Gongfu
- Darjeeling muscatel
- Fuding Silver Needle
- Golden Monkey
- Golden Needle
- Gong Mei
- Gu Shu black tea
- Gui Hua Xiang
- Guifei oolong
- Hawaiian tea
- Hong Shui Dong Ding
- Hong Shui oolong
- Huang Guan Yin
- Huang Jin Ya
- Jasmine dragon pearl
- Jasmine Silver Needle
- Jiang Hua Xiang Dan Cong
- Jin Jun Mei
- Jingmai sheng pu-erh
- Jiu Qu Hong Mei
- Junshan Yinzhen
- Ling Tou Dan Cong
- Lychee black tea
- Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong
- Mi Xiang black tea
- Mi Xiang oolong
- Moonlight White
- Nannuo sheng pu-erh
- Nepali white tea
- Nilgiri frost tea
- Oriental Beauty
- Pressed white tea cake
- Rose Congou
- Ruby 18
- Shan Tuyet
- Sheng dragon ball
- Sheng maocha
- Song Zhong Dan Cong
- Tanyang Gongfu
- Tanyang Jin Hao
- Thai black tea
- Wai Shan Xiao Zhong
- Wakoucha
- Ye Sheng black tea
- Yi Hong
- Yiwu sheng pu-erh
- You Hua Xiang
- Yunnan Bai Hao black
- Yunnan Golden Bud
- Yunnan silver needle
- Zhangping Shui Xian
- Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong (unsmoked)
- 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.