Spice
Cinnamon and cassia above all — a small band in unflavoured tea, and one where the cultivar name is a trap.
Spice notes are uncommon in unflavoured tea and the catalogue reflects that: five usages across five strings. Cinnamon and cassia bark are the usual referents, appearing on aged and roasted material; sassafras turns up once. The trap worth naming is Rou Gui, the Wuyi cultivar whose name means cinnamon and which is described in exactly those terms — the tea is not spiced and nothing is added, and the name reports a resemblance the cultivar is selected for. Where a tea tastes strongly and unambiguously of spice, it is almost always a blend, and masala chai is a recipe rather than a leaf.
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
- Cultivar or terroir
Rou Gui is named for a cinnamon-like character it is selected for. The resemblance is the reason for the name; nothing is added to the tea.
Attributed to the plant material or the place it grew.
Types: type-oolong-tea.
- Processing step
Roasting and age move several teas towards the warm-spice end of their range without any spice being involved.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-roasting, process-ageing.
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.
cassia bark · cinnamon · light spice · sassafras · sweet spice
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Ceylon black tea
- Darjeeling autumn flush
- Rou Gui
- Ruby 18
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.