Texture
How the liquor moves in the mouth — silky, oily, thin or rough — as distinct from how much of it there seems to be.
Two teas can carry the same weight and feel completely different: one glides, one drags. Texture covers that difference, and Chinese tasting vocabulary names it as a quality in its own right (hua, roughly smoothness or slipperiness) rather than as a shade of body. In this catalogue it is the axis behind the distinction between a tea recorded as silky and one recorded as rich — the numeric body score can be identical for both. It is affected by processing: careful rolling that keeps the leaf intact, thorough sorting, and a long slow finishing bake all tend towards a smoother liquor, while broken leaf and dust tend towards a rougher one. It is also the quality most often lost by brewing too hard, since aggressive pouring both breaks leaf and raises astringency, and astringency is felt as roughness.
Which sense this is
Mouthfeel. Felt rather than tasted or smelled: texture, weight, viscosity, and the drying grip of astringency, which is a physical effect in the mouth rather than a flavour.
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
Sorting and stalk-picking remove the fragments and stems that make a liquor read as rough, which is a large part of why refining exists as a separate stage in Japanese and Chinese production.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: processing-sorting-and-grading, processing-s32-stalk-picking.
- Observed, cause unsettled
The thick, oily texture attributed to old-bush material and to well-aged sheng is consistently reported by drinkers and is not explained by any mechanism TeaHQ can state.
Reliably observed and not explained. Recorded as unexplained rather than given a mechanism it has not earned.
Processing: process-ageing. Types: type-dark-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Astringency (Mouthfeel) — A tactile sensation, not a taste: polyphenols binding salivary proteins so the mouth stops feeling lubricated.
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.