Things You Probably Don't Know About Tea Tasting

There is a bottle of aftershave in my bathroom cabinet that has barely moved in twenty years. A quarter used, if that. Mrs Spoon bought it for me at some point in the distant past, and there it sits, patient and unloved, every time I open the door.

I am not getting rid of it. But I am also not wearing it.

This is not sentiment, or not entirely. It is habit. When you spend years training as a professional tea taster, you stop reaching for strong scents. Not because anyone sits you down and reads you a rulebook, but because it is quietly understood. You are working with your nose. You do not want to walk into a tasting room trailing something that competes with a Darjeeling first flush or muddies a delicate green. Your colleagues do not want that either.

The same logic applies to lunch. Garlic is fine on a Friday evening. It is considerably less welcome at one o'clock before an afternoon session with six teas on the bench. Nobody says anything directly. They do not need to.

These are the things that accumulate over five years of training that nobody tells you about at the start.

The spoons are silver plated, for instance. Not for ceremony, but because base metals can leave a taste. The cups are white, always, and that is not an accident either.

Then there is the colour blindness test. I had not thought about that since 1983, when a school nurse handed me a set of Ishihara plates and I squinted at numbers hidden inside coloured dots, presumably to determine whether NHS tortoiseshell frames were in my future. It turns out the same test matters considerably more when you are grading tea. The colour of a liquor, the clarity, the depth, the way it sits in the cup, these are not decorative observations. They are data. Candidates have been excluded from tasting programmes because of it. I passed without drama, though I will admit the memory of those dots came back to me the first time I sat the professional version.

Five years of training. A colour test borrowed from optometry. Silver spoons. An unspoken agreement about what you eat for lunch.

None of this is on the label, which is probably as it should be. You should be thinking about what is in your cup, not about the machinery behind it. But the machinery is there, and it is more involved than most people imagine.

The bottle of aftershave is staying in the cabinet. Mrs Spoon chose it, and that counts for something. I just never quite got into the habit. Occupational, you might say.