Thinness
Not enough liquor in the mouth — a mouthfeel fault, and usually a brewing one.
A thin cup feels like flavoured water: the taste may be present and correct, and there is nothing behind it. It is the mirror image of body and it has a short list of causes, most of which are at the drinker's end. Too little leaf is the commonest. Water that has been boiled repeatedly or is very soft extracts less. A tea that has given its best infusions and is being pushed for one more will thin out before it loses flavour entirely. Where the cause is not brewing it is usually material: leaf plucked too coarse for the style, or a blend built down to a price. Thinness is worth keeping in the vocabulary despite being a fault, because the word a drinker needs when a cup disappoints is often this one rather than a flavour term, and `/troubleshooting` cannot diagnose what it cannot name.
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
- Brewing variable
Too little leaf for the vessel is the most common cause by a wide margin. Steeping longer to compensate makes the cup harsher without making it any fuller.
Produced at the drinker's end, by a brewing choice or a brewing error.
- Brewing variable
Very soft or repeatedly boiled water extracts less, and a tea that tastes hollow in one house and full in another is often reporting the water rather than the leaf.
Produced at the drinker's end, by a brewing choice or a brewing error.
When it is a fault, and when it is not
Always a fault in the sense that no tea is made to be thin. Note that a deliberately light tea is not thin — a first-flush Darjeeling or a silver needle is meant to be delicate, and delicacy has structure behind it where thinness has none.
Not to be confused with
- Body (Mouthfeel) — How much the liquor weighs in the mouth, independent of how strong it tastes.
What gets said that is not right
That a light tea and a thin tea are the same. A silver needle is light on purpose and has a structure underneath; a thin cup has nothing underneath, which is precisely the complaint.
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.