National-Approved Professionality Sensory Evaluation Enhances Ultimate Pursuance of Taste for Hand-Shaken Beverages

撰文者:Lillian

Taiwan’s boutique tea leaves are widely popular internationally, especially the semi-fermented Oolong Tea and Paochong Tea. Therefore, there are many tea factories and tea farmers planting teas in Taiwan, but the same tea species planted by the tea farmers will turn out with slightly different tastes under different environments, different temperatures, and different criteria. Thus, how to accurately identify the differences in the taste among different teas (tastes such as bitter, astringent, sweet aftertaste, etc.) has initiated the Elementary, Intermediate, Intermediate-Advanced Classes for Tea Leaf Sensory Evaluation developed by the Tea Research and Extension Station, COA, conducting appraisal and training for professional tea leaf sensual evaluation talents, thereby making a direct contribution to the raw materials end, the market end, and the competition end, even indirectly contributing to the base tea development for the hand-shaken beverage domain, for instance, branded stores and raw material factories.

Chen En Food and TachunGho Enterprise factory has at least 6 personnel with the Elementary Certificate for Professional Talent of Tea Sensory Evaluation, including beverage preparation lecturers, QA supervisors, and vice general managers. Moreover, the QA supervisor and vice general manager are further qualified with the Intermediate Certificate for Professional Talent of Tea Sensory Evaluation. This intermediate certificate has been awarded to less than 100 people in Taiwan. Therefore, it has proven our demands towards the high-quality taste of tea leaves, so we can be able to provide clients with more precise taste opinions when preparing beverages and designing the menu, as differentiation can be created with the different tastes of tea leaves, while sharp judgment can assist the clients in finding out the unique tastes differing to others, to feel the sweetness, the sourness, the bitterness and the astringency of the beverages.

In the training and the final evaluation, the most challenging part is the Water Selection stage. As recalled by Ethan, the beverage preparation lecturer, the organizer specially invited the Water Sommelier from the International Water Sommelier Association to teach the students how to apply sensory evaluation and the structure of the taste buds on the tongue to accurately identify the sourness, sweetness, bitterness and salty in water. This part is also the most difficult in the test, where the students taking the test must be able to tell which two glasses of water taste the same out of ten glasses of water within a limited time, as well as identifying which glass is sour, sweet, bitter and salty.

It sounds simple and one should be able to tell the answer theoretically by drinking? However, the truth is that the amount added to each glass is very little, and when 1L of water is added with 2-3g of sugar, training and guidance are required to identify the differences. It is an extremely difficult test and since everyone’s sharpness of taste differs, the time taken to identify the tastes will be different as well. For instance, our lecturer, Ethan is extremely sensitive towards bitter, astringent and sweet tastes, hence when developing beverages and evaluating beverages, he would take special notices of these points.

Through the addition of such training and evaluation to our quality management procedure, the QA personnel will always execute the Brewing test before the shipment to ensure whether or not there is a difference in the taste, acting as the final checking of the product. The lecturer is devoted to the customer menu design service and the teaching classes, assisting clients to create beverages with differentiation. Moreover, we are also devoted to the product development process as well as the introduction content of the tea leaf products, where we provide detailed descriptions from the taste to the texture for each tea product, along with the final suggestions for the appropriate applications, thereby offering the best services to the clients.

For more details, please refer to the following videos and articles: 【Tachungho New Product Flavoured Tea Unboxing】

●【Hand-shaken Tea Can Be Tasted!? [Five Attribute Chart], the Exclusive Tea Technique of Tachungho (Part I)】

參考資料:
1. 開平學苑 茶葉感官品評初級班
2. 行政院農業委員會茶業改良場