The chain a note usually travels
A note is written by a producer or an exporter, translated, adapted by an importer, condensed by a retailer, and reproduced by aggregators and by other retailers selling the same lot. At each step it is shortened and made more attractive, and the details that could be wrong are the first to go. The result is that the same three adjectives circulate across a dozen shops for teas that are not the same tea, and that a description reaching a buyer has often had no contact with a cup for several links. This is not usually deception. It is the ordinary attrition of copy moving through a supply chain, and it explains why so many product pages describe a category rather than a product. Translation deserves its own mention in that chain, because it loses more than words. A producer’s description may use an evaluative vocabulary with no English equivalent, and the translator’s options are to explain the term, substitute an approximation or drop it. Approximation is the usual choice, which is how precise assessments of a finish or a mouthfeel arrive in English as smooth. A good deal of the vagueness in translated tea copy started life as something specific.
The kinds of note, and their different weights
Producer notes are closest to the tea and are shaped by what the producer wants to sell. Importer and specialist retailer notes are often the most useful, because the writer tasted the lot and has an interest in the description matching, since a mismatch produces returns and lost customers. Competition and cupping scores are the most rigorous and the least transferable, because they were produced under standardised brewing that resembles nobody’s drinking. Community reviews are the most independent and the most variable, and their value comes from aggregation rather than from any single one. And catalogue notes, including this one’s, are editorial syntheses that should say so. Weighting a note starts with asking which of these it is, and the answer is usually visible from where it was published. A sixth kind has grown quickly and behaves unlike the others: text generated from a template or a model rather than from a cup. It reads plausibly, uses the conventional vocabulary of the category, and has no relationship to the specific lot at all. Because it is fluent it is harder to dismiss than clumsy copy, and the tests on the empty-description page — could this sentence be false, does it survive substitution into another tea — are the ones that catch it.
Cultivar signature against personal association
A useful distinction for deciding how much to expect a note to transfer. Some notes recur across producers, years and continents and are properties of the plant material or the style: the mint-and-cinnamon character reported for Ruby 18, the creamy note associated with Jin Xuan, the muscatel of a Darjeeling second flush, the formal aroma-type classification the Phoenix Dan Cong growers themselves use. These are worth taking seriously and worth using as a filter. Other notes are one taster’s association — a library, a particular childhood sweet, a specific place — and are not wrong, but nobody should expect to find them. Notes that appear repeatedly across independent sources are evidence; a single vivid note is worth enjoying and not relying on. Between the two extremes sits a large and useful middle category: notes that are conventional within a tradition. The muscatel of a Darjeeling, the orchid of a Keemun, the mineral character of Wuyi tea and the marine quality of gyokuro are all conventions that a whole trade uses, which makes them reliable as communication whether or not any two tasters would have arrived at them independently. This catalogue marks such notes as commonly described, and the hedge is doing real work.
The reference problem
Every note is a comparison to something the reader is assumed to know, and that assumption fails constantly across cultures. Sweet potato as a note for Dian Hong works for a reader whose reference is the Chinese variety and works poorly otherwise. Longan, osmanthus, yam, jujube and cassia bark all assume familiarity. In the other direction, English notes such as biscuit, digestive and blackcurrant assume a British reference set that translates badly. This is a structural limitation of the whole practice rather than a fault in any particular note, and it is one of the reasons this catalogue keeps a coarse controlled vocabulary alongside the prose: floral survives translation and osmanthus does not. It is also why a note that lands for you is worth recording in your own words rather than adopting someone else’s. There is a second-order version of the problem worth noticing. Once a reference note becomes conventional, later tasters encounter the word before the tea and find what they were told to find, which is a well-known effect in sensory evaluation generally. That does not make the convention wrong, and it does mean the agreement between independent descriptions is weaker evidence than it looks once a note has entered general circulation.
What a note can and cannot do
It can point at a resemblance and help you recognise something you would otherwise have passed over — that is the entire job, and a good note does it well. It cannot tell you whether you will like a tea, because it describes character rather than preference. It cannot substitute for a parameter set, since the same tea brewed two ways produces two sets of notes. And it is not a claim about content: nothing has been added, and the compounds a leaf produces simply overlap with those in other foods. The language to be suspicious of is any note stated with more confidence than a sensory impression can carry, and particularly any description that has moved from what a tea tastes like to what it does, which has stopped being a tasting note. It also cannot substitute for the fields that actually predict a purchase. Origin, harvest year, cultivar, manufacture and roast level constrain what a tea can be in a way that no note does, and a listing rich in notes and empty of those fields has described the writer’s impression of a tea nobody can identify. Notes are most valuable attached to a specific, dated, located product, and least valuable when they are the only specific thing present.
How to build notes you can actually use
Write your own, badly, and keep them together. 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, because a note without a ratio, a temperature and a time describes an event rather than a tea. Compare rather than contemplate, since a note produced against another cup is far more reliable than one produced from memory. And revisit: a tea judged early is often reassessed once you have a frame for it, and a note you disagree with a year later is the clearest evidence available that your palate has changed. One further habit makes the record far more useful later: note what the tea is not as well as what it is. Recording that a tea was less astringent than expected, or lacked the roast character its description promised, captures a comparison rather than an impression, and comparisons are what transfer. A notebook of superlatives is a diary; a notebook of differences is an instrument, and it takes the same amount of writing.