Malt
The defining note of Assam and of orthodox black tea — and the descriptor with more surface spellings in this catalogue than any other.
Malt is the grain-sweet, biscuity, slightly bready character of fully oxidised black tea, and it is what most people mean when they say a tea tastes like tea. It is most strongly associated with Assam and with the Indian orthodox blacks built on assamica material, and it survives milk, which is much of why those teas are drunk that way. It is also the clearest single illustration of how this catalogue's free-text layer actually works: fifty-one usages spread across nine distinct spellings — malt, light malt, dark malt, fresh malt, dry malt, soft malt, brisk malt, heavy malt and strong malt — every one of them the same head noun with a different modifier in front. No controlled vocabulary picked those modifiers and no filter could ever have matched them to each other. Collapsing them is the single largest thing this crosswalk does.
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 followed by firing. Orthodox rolling gives a rounder malt than CTC does, which produces a sharper and more one-dimensional version of the same band.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-orthodox, process-oxidation, process-drying. Types: type-black-tea.
- Cultivar or terroir
Associated with assamica material. The same processing on small-leaf sinensis gives a lighter and less malty cup.
Attributed to the plant material or the place it grew.
Types: type-black-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Cocoa (Aroma) — Dry cocoa powder rather than chocolate bar — a marker of Yunnan black tea and of some well-aged shou.
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.
brisk malt · clean malt · dark malt · dry malt · fresh malt · heavy malt · light malt · malt · soft malt · strong malt
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Afternoon blend
- Anamalai tea
- Assam
- Assam clonal
- Assam first flush
- Assam golden tips
- Assam second flush
- Atherton Tablelands tea
- Azores tea
- Bitaco tea
- Burundian black tea
- Cameron Highlands black tea
- Cameroonian black tea
- Chai blend base
- Charleston black tea
- CTC black tea
- Dian Hong
- Dimbula
- Dooars and Terai
- Earl Grey
- English Breakfast
- Georgian black tea
- Golden Monkey
- Golden Needle
- Indonesian orthodox black
- Irish Breakfast
- Java black tea
- Jhapa CTC
- Kandy tea
- Kangra tea
- Kenyan black tea
- Kenyan orthodox black tea
- Lahijan tea
- Lankaran tea
- Magwa tea
- Malawi black tea
- Mambilla tea
- Mauritian vanilla tea
- Mozambican black tea
- Munnar tea
- Myanmar black tea
- Nilgiri
- Ning Hong
- Orthodox black tea
- Rose Congou
- Ruhuna
- Rwandan black tea
- Rwandan orthodox black
- Sabaragamuwa tea
- Sahambavy tea
- Samovar blend
- Scottish Breakfast
- Sun Moon Lake Assam
- Sylhet tea
- Tanyang Gongfu
- Tanzanian black tea
- Thai black tea
- Turkish çay
- Ugandan black tea
- Uva
- Vale do Ribeira tea
- Wahgi valley tea
- Wakoucha
- Wayanad tea
- Wush Wush tea
- Yi Hong
- Yingde Hong
- Yunnan Bai Hao black
- Zi Juan black tea
- Zimbabwean black tea
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.