Scorched
Burnt rather than roasted: an acrid, ashy edge from leaf that met too much heat too fast.
Roasting and burning are not points on one scale that a producer can stop at whichever they prefer. A charcoal-roasted oolong or a hojicha is roasted, and the character is warm, sweet and grain-like. Scorched leaf is acrid, thin and ashy, and the acridity sits on top of everything else rather than joining it. It comes from heat applied too fast or unevenly — a pan too hot at fixation, a roast pushed to save time, a basket left too close to the charcoal — and it is not recoverable. The distinction matters commercially: heavy roasting is sometimes used to cover a defect in the underlying material, and a tea that reads as scorched rather than roasted is usually being asked to hide something. Note also that hojicha's whole character is a deep roast taken deliberately far, and calling it scorched would be a category error rather than a criticism.
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
Heat applied too fast or unevenly at fixation or at roasting. Pan-firing is the step where it happens most often, because the surface of the leaf can pass the point of no return while the interior is still being fixed.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-pan-firing, process-roasting, process-charcoal-roasting. Types: type-green-tea, type-oolong-tea.
When it is a fault, and when it is not
A fault wherever it appears. The line between it and a deliberate deep roast is real and is judged on whether the character is acrid and separate from the tea, or warm and integrated with it — hojicha and heavily roasted Wuyi oolong are the second, not the first.
Not to be confused with
- Roast (Aroma) — Char and charcoal from heat applied to the leaf itself — not smoke, and not scorching either.
What gets said that is not right
That a strongly roasted tea and a burnt one are the same thing at different intensities. They are different outcomes: one integrates with the tea, the other sits on top of it and does not fade with age.
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.