Rebecca: Hi I'm Rebecca Brayton and welcome to watchmojo.com. Today, we’re speaking with Kevin Gascoyne, an International Tea Taster. All about tea and he will be walking us through tea tasting.
Kevin: When I go to India in the Spring, this is a traditional Indian tasting kit. I’ll often taste 50 teas at a time with this style of equipment. And in the period that I'm over that, I would usually taste up to a thousand teas of which I’ll select about fifteen for an annual count of luck and adding water of 95 degrees Celsius to a measure of 2.5 grams. These are some teas that have just come in from Uganda. So we’re coming up to three minutes here, looking nice and dark, and I’ll show you what we do next.
So here we go. Ready? This is a way of giving each tea equal treatment so you’re going to run off. Now because the leaf is so fine, I’m going to have to filter it into a second cup. Here we can see the little granules of an industrial tea. This is what we call “dust” I’m just making sure there aren’t too many leaves in each cup so that we don’t get a continue of infusion.
So now we have three elements, we have the dry leaf in the front, the infused leaf which we call the infusion, and the liquid which we call the liquor. Usually we start with the dry leaf, then we smell the leaves and tea tastes traditionally work with a tea leaf on the end of the nose, it’s kind of a trademark.
As you notice, I’m sucking in quite a bit of air. The idea here of sucking in air as we taste is causing a vapor, it will cover all the surfaces inside our mouth. That way, we can give the tea a full analysis with all the different sense of tastebuds that we have in different parts of our mouth. Also, we’ll have a film of tea on the roof of the mouth where we can look for the after taste.
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