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Austin Hodge at ProSense Consumer Research Center tasting lab.
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Andrew McNeill
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The International Specialty Tea Association (ISTA) recently announced that it had developed new protocols to evaluate specialty tea. The non-profit has assembled a panel of tasters who share a common lexicon and have calibrated their sensory expertise to consistently judge tea quality based on the skill of tea makers that is evident in the cup. Photo courtesy ISTA
Judging tea quality and publishing the results on a scale like the Specialty Coffee Association’s cupping criteria at first appears insurmountable. There are more than 3,000 distinct tea varieties grouped into six major types used to make 20,000 different teas.
In contrast, there are two popular types of coffee and perhaps 24 popular wine grapes. Describing every observable attribute in coffee, wine, or tea is daunting. But viewing quality as the absence of defects and flaws in roasting and winemaking makes winnowing by consensus practical and precise. Excellence is then easily recognized and rewarded based on skill and flourish.
During the past several years, the International Specialty Tea Association (ISTA) has pondered, “What do all fine teas have in common?” The answer: A skilled tea maker.
“Internationally, there aren’t a lot of standards that govern tea quality, and unlike other beverages, coffee, namely, where there are specific thresholds for what you could call a specialty coffee, there isn’t a threshold or a uniform way of defining a specialty tea,” said ISTA spokesperson Andrew McNeill.
“There are lots of different systems of evaluating teas of different origins, different qualities. There isn’t a lot of agreement on how to evaluate your tea and what aspects you should be looking for,” he said.
“Our project is trying to develop a system that can do just that,” he said.
Last month ISTA announced that it had developed evaluation protocols and assembled a panel of tasters who share a common lexicon and have calibrated their sensory expertise to consistently judge tea quality, based on the skill of tea makers that is evident in the cup.
McNeill explained that “over the last few years, our main project has been to develop evaluation standards, a framework for the evaluation of specialty tea, to give some shape to the premium tea products that producers are making tea and, increasingly, what consumers are buying.”
To develop the protocols, ISTA founder Austin Hodge, founder of Seven Cups Fine Chinese Tea, and McNeill drew on the skills of a committee of professional members. ISTA then enlisted Dr. Rena Shifren, founder of Tucson-based ProSense Consumer Research, to devise tasting protocols to assemble and calibrate a global panel of professional tasters that can reliably evaluate a range of teas. Evaluations were done remotely due to COVID-19. The work took 14 months.
“Now that the protocols and panel are in place, the first full-panel descriptive analysis will be of black tea due to its commercial importance and high variability,” says McNeill.
The Association writes that “Producers of black tea, new and old, are seeking a sustainable market for high-value, high-skill specialty products and need a system that recognizes and rewards tea makers for that effort.”
“I very much hope the tea industry will benefit from the work we’ve been doing - and maybe one day I’ll get to see the protocols (in whatever iteration they end up over time) being used as successfully and ubiquitously in the specialty tea industry as the SCA scoring system is in coffee,” said Shifren.
“Understanding consumers is rarely easy, but having a road map to navigate the complicated world of consumer insights can make the journey more fun and profitable,” she writes.