One of the most interesting experiments you can try with a friend (or more) is blind tasting.
As a vendor, this is an essential step. On our overseas sourcing trips we now don’t purchase any inventory without blind tasting.
What is Blind Tasting?
Before we get into the merits of that, just a brief explanation of what does blind tasting mean.
It is not to be taken literally- i.e. blindfold taste test- but it means trying a tea anonymously that is without prior knowledge of what that tea is.
To eliminate other variables, we use the same vessels and parameters for brewing.
In our case, we often take 3 to 5 different teas of the same type- for example Mi Lan Xiang- from different vendors.
Image from sxc.hu
What I would do is I would label them 1-3 and record which number is from which vendor.
E.g. 1 is from Wang, 2 is from Lin and 3 is from Chen for example
Then my wife would re-arrange the 3 teas and label them from A-C before passing it to me.
Hence, neither one of us would know which tea we are trying. During the process of tasting, we silently scribble notes and compare at the end before revealing what each tea is.
Very often, we find our thoughts are markedly different from our initial impression.
This is often the same experience with others and many experienced tea purchasers I know go through a similar process.
For people who are not in the trade, this is still a worthwhile venture that reveals much. Very often, what we choose in a blind tasting may be diametrically opposed to that under ‘normal circumstances’ and here are 3 suggested reasons:
The Audacity of Hype
This article which talks about the fallacies of tasting may be about wine but there is some parallel in the tea world as well.
There are plenty of great examples there of how perception alters our impression but here is one of my favorites:
“A recent New Yorker piece describes a followup to Brochet’s 2001 study, wherein he served wine experts a run-of-the-mill Bordeaux in two different bottles:
One bottle bore the label of a fancy grand cru, the other of an ordinary vin de table. Although they were being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the bottles nearly opposite descriptions. The grand cru was summarized as being “agreeable,” “woody,” “complex,” “balanced,” and “rounded,” while the most popular adjectives for the vin de table included “weak,” “short,” “light,” “flat,” and “faulty.””
That’s the power of hype. The same wine- and it works for tea as well, especially among non-traditional tea drinkers.
A wholesaler once shared about his bewilderment in this matter. He had supplied the same tea to 2 different retailers, both of whom entered the tea for a ‘prestigious’ award- 1 was highly rated while the other was not.
On a personal note, once I visited a “well-regarded” teahouse and the proprietor lauded her Tieguanyin and so forth, I sipped some and was sufficiently impressed to buy a pack. Later though, in a blind tasting at home, it rated lower than a cheap Tieguanyin I bought elsewhere on all counts.
Away from the tranquillity of the shop and the lady’s sweet talking, the tea tasted ordinary.
“What would others think of me?”
Woe to the man who disdains caviar or fails to appreciate the finer points of “Finnegan’s Wake”.
Note: Incidentally for all you who pretend to have read the latter, a literature professor once told me even he found it unreadable.
Similarly, in tea we fear exposing our “un-sophisticated palate”. We then look for obscure notes that we have read about common to this teas.
Hence if you tell someone it’s a Wuyi tea- everyone claims to taste the mineral taste, never mind that it was grown away from the “Zheng Yan” area where the soils are highest in mineral content.
Tasting blind allows us to appreciate it for what is. Not how we hope others to see us for.
Incidentally- going on a somewhat relevant non-tangent- what is a sophisticated palate anyway? One that can recognize a myriad of obscure notes? Does that help in enjoying the tea? Would it change your mind if you knew how straightforward the language of professional tea assessors (future post alert) in China is?
Our Bias
Inherently we form our own opinion or bias of certain people or things.
For example, I may WANT to like that tea more because of the background story or the cute seller.
Here’s an example- when I did sourcing in Guangdong, we tried various Xin Ren Xiang and brought small samples.
At that time, we were leaning towards buying from Huang because of his setup. However, a blind tasting revealed that the sour-faced lady (who shall remain unnamed) actually had a better version of Xin Ren Xiang.
Sub-consciously, we were rooting for Huang but in the end, tasting blind opened our eyes.
The “Pepsi Challenge” is a classic example of taste over bias. (Incidentally I used to prefer coke, these days I don’t get calories from my drinks
Naturally this exercise might seem like overkill for people who are not in the trade but if you are looking to get out a tea rut, this might spark some ideas and change your perception.
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