Mineral
Wet stone and slate — a widely used descriptor for something that has no smell, which is worth being honest about.
Mineral is one of the most-used descriptors in serious tea writing and one of the hardest to defend. Stone has no aroma. What tasters are describing is real and consistent — a cool, clean, slightly hard impression, often with a dry finish, most often on Wuyi yancha, high-mountain oolong and some Chinese greens — but the referent is a metaphor, and the mechanism behind it is not established. Wine writing has had the same argument for decades and has not settled it either. The honest position is that the descriptor names something tasters agree on and that its cause is unknown, which is what this record says. Water hardness is a genuine confounder worth naming: the same tea brewed in hard and soft water gives noticeably different mineral impressions, so some of what is attributed to the leaf is coming from the kettle. Copper sits in this band as the metallic edge some teas carry.
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.
Filed as aroma because that is how it is used, with the qualification that the impression may be partly tactile — the dry, hard quality tasters describe overlaps with astringency, and no clean separation is available.
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
Consistently reported and not explained. Stone has no aroma, and the attribution of mineral character to mineral soils is an inference that has not been demonstrated in tea or in wine.
Reliably observed and not explained. Recorded as unexplained rather than given a mechanism it has not earned.
Types: type-oolong-tea.
- Brewing variable
Water hardness changes the mineral impression of the same leaf, so part of what is attributed to a tea is contributed by the water it was brewed in.
Produced at the drinker's end, by a brewing choice or a brewing error.
Not to be confused with
- Yan yun (Finish and throat) — The evaluative category specific to Wuyi rock oolong: the quality attributed to tea grown on the cliffs rather than around them.
What gets said that is not right
That a mineral note demonstrates mineral-rich soil. The inference is standard in marketing and has not been shown; water chemistry at the drinker's end also contributes to it.
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 mineral · cold stone · copper · damp stone · faint mineral · mineral · river mist · wet rock · wet stone
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Ban Tian Yao
- Da Hong Pao
- Darjeeling autumn flush
- Duyun Mao Jian
- Fushou Shan
- Gu Shu black tea
- Gunpowder green tea
- Hawaiian tea
- Lao Cong Shui Xian
- Lu Shan Yun Wu
- Pinhead gunpowder
- Qi Lan
- Que She
- Shizuoka sencha
- Shui Jin Gui
- Taiwan Shan Cha
- Tie Luo Han
- Ugandan black tea
- Vietnamese green tea
- Wuyi Jin Guan Yin
- Wuyi Mei Zhan
- Wuyi rock tea (yancha)
- Xigui sheng pu-erh
- Xinyang Mao Jian
- Ya Shi Xiang Dan Cong
- Zheng Yan yancha
- Zhi Lan Xiang Dan Cong
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.