Scented floral
Jasmine, rose and osmanthus — the three flowers that are put into tea, as opposed to the flowers tea is compared to.
A jasmine note in a tea usually got there because somebody put jasmine there. Scenting is a production step with its own labour and its own economics: fresh blossoms are layered with the tea overnight, repeatedly over several nights for good grades, and then removed, so that the finished tea carries the aroma and not the flowers. The same is done with osmanthus in Guangdong and Fujian and, less often, with rose. Keeping these three apart from the intrinsic floral band matters because they answer a different question about a tea — a scented tea is telling you about a decision at the factory, not about the cultivar or the mountain. The distinction is not absolute and this record does not pretend it is: some Dan Cong cultivars produce a jasmine-like aroma with nothing added, and Gui Hua Xiang is a Dan Cong named for an osmanthus character it develops on its own. Where the catalogue records the note on an unscented tea, it is the aroma being compared to the flower rather than the flower being present.
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
Scenting: fresh blossoms are layered with the finished tea, left overnight, and removed, often over several rounds. The flower-removal and finishing rounds are separate named steps because grade depends on how many times it is done.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-scenting, processing-s32-flower-removal. Types: type-green-tea.
- Cultivar or terroir
Some Dan Cong cultivars develop a jasmine-like or osmanthus-like aroma without scenting, which is what their names refer to.
Attributed to the plant material or the place it grew.
Types: type-oolong-tea.
Not to be confused with
- White floral (Aroma) — The broad intrinsic floral band — gardenia, honeysuckle, lilac, lily, blossom — that the leaf produces without anything being added to it.
What gets said that is not right
That dried petals in the packet indicate a well-scented tea. In the traditional method the flowers are taken out; petals left in are decoration, and in cheap jasmine tea they often accompany an aroma that came from oil rather than from blossom.
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 rose · jasmine · osmanthus · rose
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Bi Tan Piao Xue
- Dimbula
- Gui Hua Wulong
- Gui Hua Xiang
- Huang Jin Gui
- Huang Zhi Xiang Dan Cong
- Jasmine dragon pearl
- Jasmine green tea
- Jasmine Silver Needle
- Jiu Qu Hong Mei
- Lahijan tea
- Lychee black tea
- Oriental Beauty
- Rose Congou
- Sanpincha
- Shui Jin Gui
- Uda Pussellawa 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.