Sweet potato
The signature of Yunnan black tea — roasted sweet potato, a single vivid descriptor with no substitute.
Hong shu xiang, roast sweet potato fragrance, is the standard descriptor for Dian Hong and it is one of those rare tasting notes that people recognise instantly and do not argue about. It is warm, thick, obviously sweet and specifically the smell of the flesh of a baked sweet potato rather than of sugar or caramel. It marks fully oxidised large-leaf Yunnan material and it is one of the things buyers check a Dian Hong for. It is kept as its own record rather than folded into the caramel or the cereal band because neither of those gets it right — the note is vegetable-sweet, not confection-sweet, and losing that is losing the descriptor.
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
Full oxidation of large-leaf assamica material, followed by drying. The note is characteristic of Yunnan black tea specifically rather than of black tea generally.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-oxidation, process-drying. Types: type-black-tea.
- Cultivar or terroir
Associated with large-leaf Yunnan material. The same processing on small-leaf sinensis does not usually give it.
Attributed to the plant material or the place it grew.
Types: type-black-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Caramel and sugar (Aroma) — Cooked-sugar notes from light caramel to dark treacle, plus the specific 'rock sugar' descriptor of Chinese tasting language.
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.
sweet potato
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Chuan Hong Gongfu
- Dian Hong
- Golden Needle
- Tanyang Jin Hao
- Thai black tea
- Wai Shan Xiao Zhong
- Wakoucha
- Yunnan Bai Hao black
- Yunnan Golden Bud
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.