Had this one cold brewed, as I quite often do. Not much note worthy or out of the ordinary; primarily vanilla/strawberry taste in a way that I can only describe as “Froot Loops” which a very light, watery vegetal backdrop from the bamboo. It’s hard to describe the flavor of bamboo as anything other than bamboo, to be quite honest.
More than anything I just wanted to write about the fact that…
Tea Sommelier class resumed today!
Since I’ve now completed “Tea 101” I have seven other ‘classes’ to complete before I can take my Tea Sommelier certification; I know I discussed in prior tasting notes which I’d be taking next since I can now do those seven in any order – the plan was to take Tea 105 From Bush To Cup but not enough people registered for it so rather than lose a month of class I switched into another class – Tea 103 Sensory Development: Tea Science of Taste. The first online session for that class was today!
So far it’s definitely more science based which I get; it’s important to understand how taste works and to find some sort of ‘common shared ground’ for something that can be so subjective. This past week focused on mapping out the places on the tongue where we experience each taste: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter and Umami. For whatever reason there’s been no mention of “Spicy” as a taste so far. We actually haven’t even had any tea tastings/cuppings yet for class and we don’t this week coming up either. Instead this week we taste tested salt, honey, coffee beans, lemons, and tomatoes.
Next week we’re doing tastings of water (distilled, spring and tap), olive oil, chocolate, and coffee beans (Brazilian, and a few others I don’t remember). The broke as fuck cashier part of me is kind worrying about the cost of buying three different kinds of olive oil I’ll probably never use again; I can’t even remember the last time I cooked with olive oil, and I know from my experience as a cashier that even buying the smallest bottles that’s not gonna be cheap. Picking up like four different chocolate bars? Simple. We even sell loose bulk coffee beans in all the kinds we need to test; realistically I can just buy a cup’s worth of each kind of bean and it wont add up to too much. The other thing I don’t really want to buy? Distilled water. At work we only sell it in 4L jugs. What the hell am I going to do with the other 3.9L after I drink my little sample amount!?
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I thought that whole notion of mapping the tongue for different tastes had been discredited. Can you just get some friends or coworkers to give you a couple ounces of whatever olive oil they have at home? You could probably get samples of a few different varieties that way.
For the most part it has, and that’s actually a part of what we’re discussing in class – what the flaws with mapping out the tongue are, but also the consistencies. It’s really interesting, honestly, even if I don’t TOTALLY buy into it. I ended up getting olive oil samples from our in store chef – he had bottles of everything I needed. I did buy the chocolate bars/coffee beans today though.
I thought that whole notion of mapping the tongue for different tastes had been discredited. Can you just get some friends or coworkers to give you a couple ounces of whatever olive oil they have at home? You could probably get samples of a few different varieties that way.
For the most part it has, and that’s actually a part of what we’re discussing in class – what the flaws with mapping out the tongue are, but also the consistencies. It’s really interesting, honestly, even if I don’t TOTALLY buy into it. I ended up getting olive oil samples from our in store chef – he had bottles of everything I needed. I did buy the chocolate bars/coffee beans today though.