Jim Marks

So who did I miss? Fr. Hopko?! I think this is a celebration tea for sure! Wonderful!

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

JIm…….I think that’s true of alot of what we eat and drink. I’ll pay more attention to it in the future.

Yes and no.

True, our tastebuds only register the six basic flavors: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami and spice/heat, and the nose does the rest.

But what I mean here is that my tongue isn’t registering any of those six things, from what I can tell, only the presence of the textured water in my mouth.

The whole mouth feels the slight drying astringency after swallowing, but that’s not a taste, either.

Any flavored tea is going to act directly on the tongue, I suspect, although scented teas probably don’t.

I don’t believe tea, no matter the processing, has any actual sugar or salt in it, nor spice/heat nor umami, so really the only possible tongue registering options are sour and bitter.

I’m starting to think tea is all in the nose.

Don’t you think some teas have a natural sweetness to them w/o being sugar sweet?

Well, yes, yunnan golds particularly.

But unless it is a chemical compound that the tastebuds can trigger on, it will still be in the nose, not on the tongue.

I’d have to talk to a bio-chemist who knows tea, but I don’t think any of the processing which is done to tea brings out a natural sugar of any kind. Tea is essentially zero calorie which suggests it has no sugars, naturally.