Sourness
A taste that is usually a fault in tea, and occasionally a producer's intention.
Acidity is central to how coffee and wine are assessed and marginal in how tea is. A sour tea is normally a tea that went wrong: leaf that sat too warm and damp between plucking and fixation, a wet-piling batch that ran acidic, or a cake stored somewhere humid. The sourness sits at the front of the sip and is distinct from the bright, mouth-watering quality that a good first-flush Darjeeling or a high-mountain oolong has, which tasters often call brisk rather than sour. There are exceptions that matter. Some Liu Bao and some Anhua dark teas are described as carrying a controlled sourness that the producing tradition regards as correct, and a young sheng can be sharp in a way that ages out. Recording sourness as context-dependent rather than as a fault outright is what keeps those cases describable.
Which sense this is
Taste. Registered on the tongue. There are few of these and tea writing uses them loosely — most words that sound like tastes are smells.
Sensory primitive. A single sensation that can be isolated and trained on, independently of what the tea reminds anyone of.
Where it comes from
- Processing step
Fresh leaf held too long, too warm or too densely packed before fixation begins to sour, which is one of the reasons transport and holding are treated as production steps rather than logistics.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: processing-s32-leaf-transport, process-kill-green.
- Processing step
A wet-piling batch that runs too wet or is turned too little can finish sour, and turning schedules exist partly to stop it.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-wet-piling, processing-s32-pile-turning. Types: type-dark-tea.
When it is a fault, and when it is not
A fault when it comes from delayed or overheated leaf before fixation, from a wet-piling batch that ran acidic, or from damp storage — all of which are process failures. Not a fault where a producing tradition regards a measured sourness as part of the style, as in some Liu Bao, or in a young sheng whose sharpness is expected to settle.
What gets said that is not right
That sourness and briskness are the same thing. Briskness is a lively, mouth-watering quality with no sour taste behind it; sourness is an actual sour taste and usually means something went wrong upstream.
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.
cider vinegar · sour fermented leaf
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Awabancha
- Miang
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.