Umami
The savoury taste that Japanese green tea is built around, and that Western flavour wheels leave out.
Umami is a taste in the same sense that sweet and bitter are tastes: registered on the tongue, and recognised as a basic taste in its own right rather than as a blend of the others. In tea it is associated with the free amino acids that shaded leaf is rich in, theanine most abundantly, and it is the organising principle of high-grade Japanese green tea in a way that has no counterpart in the European vocabulary. Gyokuro, tencha and koicha-grade matcha are made, graded and priced around it. Almost every flavour wheel imported from wine or coffee omits it entirely, which means a taster using one of those wheels on a gyokuro has no word for the main thing the tea is doing and reaches for 'seaweed' or 'broth' — both of which are aromas, and neither of which is the taste. Recording umami as a taste, and the marine and brothy notes separately as aroma and mouthfeel, is what lets the three be described independently instead of collapsing into one another.
Which sense this is
Taste. Registered on the tongue. There are few of these and tea writing uses them loosely — most words that sound like tastes are smells.
A basic taste in its own right, not a flavour family and not a texture. The brothy weight it comes with is a mouthfeel and has its own record; the nori-like smell is an aroma and has its own record. All three usually appear together in a gyokuro, which is exactly why they are worth separating.
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
Shading the bushes for two to three weeks before plucking is the standard route to a high-umami leaf, and is what distinguishes gyokuro and tencha from sencha grown on the same estate.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-shading. Types: type-green-tea.
- Established chemistry
Free amino acids, theanine most abundantly, are the compounds behind the savoury taste. This is an amino-acid family effect rather than a single-compound attribution.
The chemical route is identified in the literature. Often a family of related compounds rather than one named molecule.
- Brewing variable
Amino acids extract readily at low temperatures while catechins need more heat, so cooler water raises the savoury character relative to the bitter one. This is why gyokuro instructions call for water near 50-60C.
Produced at the drinker's end, by a brewing choice or a brewing error.
Not to be confused with
- Marine (Aroma) — Nori and sea air — the aroma that accompanies umami in shaded Japanese green tea, and a different thing from the taste it travels with.
What gets said that is not right
That umami is 'the seaweed taste'. Seaweed is a smell; umami is a taste. A tea can have one without the other, and the confusion comes from Western tasting vocabulary having a word for the smell and none for the taste.
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.