A family made entirely by heat
Floral, green and fruit notes are released or transformed from material already in the leaf. This family is manufactured. When reducing sugars and amino acids are heated together they react through a long cascade rather than a single step, producing a large group of new compounds — among them the nitrogen-containing heterocycles associated with roasted, nutty and popcorn-like aromas, and furan derivatives associated with caramel and sweetness — along with the brown pigments that darken the material. Caramelisation of sugars alone contributes at higher temperatures. This is exactly the chemistry that browns bread crusts and roasts coffee, and it is the mechanical answer to why a fired tea smells of things that are nowhere in a fresh leaf. Two consequences follow. The pyrazines and their relatives are among the more stable aromatic compounds in tea, which is why roasted teas keep so much better than aromatic ones. And because the cascade is a sequence rather than a setting, a tea taken too far cannot be brought back, which is why roasters work upwards in stages with rests between and taste as they go.
Chestnut, and the Chinese green tea signature
Chestnut is one of the most consistently used descriptors in Chinese green tea and it is genuinely diagnostic. Pan-firing applies dry heat directly to the leaf surface during kill-green, which starts a small amount of the browning chemistry above while stopping the enzymes, and the result is the toasted, chestnut, cooked-bean character that distinguishes a Longjing or a Bi Luo Chun from a Japanese steamed tea made from comparable material. It is a well-established processing association rather than a convention, and it has a practical use: the depth of the chestnut character is a rough report on how thoroughly a green tea was fired, which in turn is a rough report on how stable it will be in storage. A well-fired Longjing is measurably more durable than a lightly fired bud tea from the same region, so the category spans a wider range of shelf lives than the word green suggests. Judging by the toasted character of the cup rather than by the category name is therefore a better guide to how long a Chinese green tea will keep, which is one of the few places where an aroma descriptor answers a storage question.
Nutty, and what the word is doing
Nutty covers a wide territory — almond, hazelnut, walnut, peanut, sesame — and is used of pan-fired Chinese greens, of hojicha and roasted stem teas, of some lightly roasted oolongs, of aged whites and of certain black teas. TeaHQ keeps `nutty` as a flavour family and `toasted` as an aroma descriptor, and the two do slightly different jobs: toasted points at the process and nutty at the resemblance. As a resemblance it is one of the more transferable descriptors, since most readers have a reference for roasted nuts, which is a genuine advantage over orchid or longan. As a diagnostic it is weaker than chestnut, because it appears in categories with different processing histories and does not narrow the field much on its own. Where it becomes informative is in combination: nutty with sweetness and body points at a roast, nutty with green notes at a pan-fired green tea, and nutty with dried fruit at an aged tea. This is the general pattern for reading the coarse families — the individual facet narrows very little and the combination narrows a great deal.
Cocoa and chocolate
Cocoa is the conventional descriptor for Keemun, alongside orchid, and it appears in some Yunnan black teas, in certain aged oolongs and in a few Nepali and Indian lots. The catalogue carries `chocolate` as a flavour family because enough records need it. On the chemistry, the compounds associated with cocoa aroma in chocolate itself come largely from the same browning cascade acting on a fermented and roasted material, so the overlap with roasted tea is mechanistically unsurprising rather than coincidental. TeaHQ nonetheless records cocoa in tea as a trade convention as much as a chemical association: it is a description a whole industry uses consistently for Keemun and it is not a claim that the two materials share a characterised profile. The distinction matters because the word is used in two registers that a reader will otherwise conflate — the specific Keemun convention, which is reliable communication, and a loose use meaning any dark, sweet, slightly bitter character, which is not. As with every convention in this file, the note is worth taking seriously as a pointer and is not worth reading as a measurement.
Roast level, method and recency, which are three variables
Reading a roasted tea requires separating three things that descriptions routinely merge. Level runs from a light finishing bake through medium and heavy to full charcoal roasting. Method matters: traditional charcoal roasting is a slow, low, repeated process over hours or days and behaves differently from electric baking, with practitioners generally describing charcoal as producing a rounder integration and electric baking a cleaner and more controllable result. Recency matters most of all to a drinker, because a freshly roasted tea is often at its least attractive — the roast sitting on the surface — and improves over months as it settles and integrates. A shop selling a tea it roasted last week is selling something unfinished. For a taster this means a roasted tea has to be assessed across infusions rather than on the first, since roast character comes out early and strongly and the base is only legible from the second or third steep onwards. Judging a heavily roasted oolong on its opening cup is judging the firing rather than the tea, and it is why these teas are so often dismissed by drinkers who tried them once.
What a roast can hide, and how to see through it
A heavy roast will mask a thin, coarse or slightly stale base, and some heavily roasted tea on the market is heavily roasted for exactly that reason. This is worth naming plainly because it is the one place in this family where a descriptor is doing concealment rather than description. The buyer’s tell is whether the roast sits over the tea or is integrated with it, which is most easily judged in the later infusions where the roast character has thinned and whatever is underneath is exposed. A good roasted tea keeps giving after the roast recedes; a covered one becomes thin and slightly hollow. The wet leaf is the second check, since scorching shows as blackened edges and a lot roasted to cover faults frequently shows unevenness. And the empty cup is the third, holding the heavier persistent compounds after the liquor has gone. None of these requires knowing anything about the tea in advance, which makes the roasted family — despite being the one most often described as difficult — one of the easiest to evaluate honestly.