help needed finding the difference between two tastes/aromas

Eat more fish and leather.

I got a pretty sensitive nose, so that’s how I can pick up and distinguish a lot of things. I also eat a lot of fish and my father does leather working in his spare time.

So yeah, either expose yourself more to foods, drink more pu’er, or blame genetics.

The general question is a really good one, along with a lot of related questions. I’m always curious about the connection between imagination and taste recognition, not because I’m thinking reviews are making it up, but because it seems like separating complex components requires skill in making unusual distinctions, which relate to an unusual way of thinking and perceiving. Lately I’m also considering taste-memory more, trying to reach back to teas I had some time ago to compare with what I drink now. My own gap is in floral components: I really don’t know what 20 different flowers smell like, even though I do run across flowers from time to time. I guess I could do scent training at the local florist, or it also works to just describe teas as floral.

Back to the question, maybe practice is the best thing. If you could somehow train with complex tastes and objective descriptions to match against them that would be nice, but I think the inconsistency in descriptions of teas one always encounters relates to people picking up on or describing similar components in different ways, getting different partial answers right, so there is some fact of the matter but it’s a bit blurry. You might check this page for a reference about different tastes in teas (towards the end, a list): http://www.worldoftea.org/tea-cupping-standards/

thanks everyone :)

I just say to sniff stuff. To me they smell very different (leather is one of my favourite smells! I could inhale the aroma of a leather journal or coat or purse for ever). Fish is salty/briny smelling, typically not an ideal smell in your pu. Leather is more earthy.

I am on board with the whole sniff and taste a bunch of random stuff. Some people are lucky and have really sensitive noses and tongues, but even those people still need to ‘train’ if they want to know what it is they are smelling/tasting.