Stewed
The dull, cooked, slightly sulphurous note of green tea made with water that was too hot or left too long.
A stewed cup smells of overcooked vegetables and tastes flattened: the fresh top notes are gone, what is left is heavy and dull, and there is often a faint sulphurous edge behind it. It is the single most common thing that goes wrong when someone brews green tea with water straight off the boil, and it is a brewing fault rather than a fault in the leaf — the same tea made at 70C is usually fine. It also occurs at the production end, where leaf held too long in a hot steamer or fired too slowly can arrive stewed before it reaches anyone. Note a deliberate exclusion in the crosswalk. Seven tea records in this catalogue use 'stewed' as a positive modifier — stewed fruit, stewed apple, stewed plum, stewed apricot — meaning cooked and jammy, which is a compliment paid to aged and heavily oxidised teas. Those strings belong to the fruit descriptors and are not mapped here; only 'stewed leaf', on a Darjeeling monsoon flush, is. A crosswalk that matched on the word rather than on the sense would have quietly labelled seven good teas as faulty, which is the argument for authoring the mapping string by string rather than by stemming.
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.
Aroma, with a taste component. What a drinker notices first is the smell of the cup, and the dulling of the taste follows from the same cause.
Compound descriptor. A familiar thing used as shorthand for a mixture of sensations. Nobody detects 'chestnut' — they recognise it.
Where it comes from
- Brewing variable
Water too hot for the style, or contact continuing too long, on green tea above all. This is an over-extraction fault at the drinker's end and not a chemical claim: what is established is the procedure that produces it.
Produced at the drinker's end, by a brewing choice or a brewing error.
Types: type-green-tea.
- Brewing variable
Leaf left sitting in the liquor rather than separated from it. A tea that was correct on the first pour and stewed by the second is reporting the vessel, not the kettle.
Produced at the drinker's end, by a brewing choice or a brewing error.
Types: type-green-tea.
- Processing step
At the production end, leaf steamed too long or dried too slowly can arrive with the same character, which is why steaming times are measured in seconds and specified by style.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-steaming, process-drying. Types: type-green-tea.
When it is a fault, and when it is not
A fault wherever it appears in this sense. The word is also used positively as a modifier on fruit notes, meaning cooked and jammy — those uses are a different sense and are not this descriptor.
Not to be confused with
- Cooked greens (Aroma) — Steamed spinach, green beans, peas and sweet corn — the correct character of steamed Japanese green tea, and a hair's breadth from a fault.
What gets said that is not right
That a stewed cup means bad leaf. It usually means hot water, and the same packet brewed cooler will make a different tea.
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.
stewed leaf
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Argentine black tea
- Darjeeling monsoon flush
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.