Why borrowed vocabulary does not work
The standard route into tasting is to read a flavour wheel, learn some terms and try to find them in a cup, and it produces a predictable outcome: the drinker finds what they were told to find, or finds nothing and concludes their palate is deficient. Neither is useful. Aroma vocabulary is acquired by encountering materials and attaching names to them, not by reading lists, and a taster who has never smelled osmanthus will register something floral and unplaceable no matter how many times they read the word. Familiarity also builds in one direction only, which is the important asymmetry: once you have smelled a material attentively you will find it in a tea that has it, and until then you will not. This is why experienced tasters seem to have arrived at their vocabulary fully formed. It did not come from a wheel; it accumulated from materials smelled and cups placed beside other cups. The practical consequence is that the most effective way to get better at tasting tea is frequently to spend time on things that are not tea, which is an unexpected recommendation and the one this page is built around.
Building the set, cheaply
The reference set is a collection of materials you have smelled deliberately and can recall. Most of it is already in a kitchen. Open the spice jars one at a time and smell them with attention rather than in passing — cinnamon and cassia separately if both are present, cardamom, clove, fennel, black pepper, star anise. Do the same with dried fruit, with nuts raw and toasted, with cocoa, with honey, with malt extract if there is any. Add the fresh materials as they come into the house: stone fruit, citrus peel, berries, herbs, cut grass, wet stone after rain, the inside of a wooden box. Smell things you would never eat, since wood, resin, leather, paper and soil all appear in tea vocabulary. None of this costs anything and all of it is more useful than another packet of tea. The only discipline required is to name each thing while smelling it, because a smell attached to a word is retrievable and one that is not is merely familiar — and the whole point of the exercise is to have a word available when a cup produces the sensation.
Writing notes that are worth rereading
Three words per tea is enough and is more than most people manage, and the value is in being forced to choose between malty and toasty rather than in the record itself. Always write the parameters alongside — leaf quantity, water temperature, time, vessel, infusion number — because a note without them describes an event rather than a tea, and the same leaf brewed two ways produces two sets of notes. Write what a tea is not as well as what it is, since recording that a tea was less astringent than expected, or lacked the roast its description promised, captures a comparison rather than an impression, and comparisons are what transfer between teas. Write before discussing the tea with anybody, because sensory judgements converge rapidly once spoken aloud, which is pleasant socially and destroys the independence of the observation. And write badly rather than not at all: a notebook of superlatives is a diary and a notebook of differences is an instrument, and both take the same amount of writing.
Using your own words, including the useless-sounding ones
A note that lands for you is worth more than a conventional one you have adopted, even if nobody else would understand it. If a tea reminds you of a particular shop, a childhood sweet, a specific room, write that down — it is a genuine memory anchor and it will let you recognise the tea again, which is the entire job of a tasting note. What such a note cannot do is communicate, so it belongs in a personal record rather than in a description written for anyone else, and the distinction between the two kinds of note is one this catalogue makes explicitly: conventions such as muscatel, orchid and the rock character of Wuyi tea are reliable communication precisely because a whole trade uses them, and a private association is reliable recall. A mature vocabulary contains both, kept apart. The commonest mistake among people who are trying is to suppress the private notes as unserious, which discards the anchors that actually work, and the second commonest is to publish them as though they were properties of the leaf.
Calibrating against other people without being flattened
At some point a personal vocabulary has to be tested against other tasters, and there is a right and a wrong way round. The wrong way is to read the seller’s note first and then look for it, which produces agreement that means nothing — a well-documented effect in sensory evaluation generally, where a taster who encounters a word before the tea finds what they were told to find. The right way is to taste, write, and then read, and to notice where you disagreed. Disagreement is the informative part: it either reveals a reference you do not have, a genuine difference in what you detect, or a description that was never about the tea. Doing this a dozen times calibrates a vocabulary faster than any amount of study, and it also builds a useful scepticism about descriptions, since a reader who has caught three sellers describing a category rather than a product will read every listing differently afterwards. The same procedure works with a friend, and it works better if both people write before either speaks.
What a vocabulary is actually for
Not for producing descriptions, which is what it looks like from outside. It is for noticing. A taster with a word for a sensation detects that sensation more reliably than one without, which is why building vocabulary and building perception are the same activity rather than two stages of one. It is also for filtering: knowing that what you dislike is roast, or smoke, or astringency, or the marine character of shaded tea, is a filterable fact that will save years of money, and it is a far more useful finding than deciding you like or dislike a category. And it is for using other people’s descriptions, since a note is a pointer and a pointer works only for a reader who has encountered the thing pointed at — so every material added to a reference set makes every future listing more informative. That compounding is the argument for spending an evening with the spice cupboard, and it is why this page recommends it before recommending any further purchase of tea.