(1) If you want to buy high-quality tea, you must master some methods to identify the quality of tea. Generally, appearance, smell, taste and soup color are used.
(2) Appearance method The appearance of tea includes the uniformity, purity, color, rope, age and tenderness of tea. Good quality tea is uniform in size and length, and the proportion of waste tea and coarse tea is small. Tea should not contain impurities, such as stems, flakes, seeds, powder, etc. Green tea is the top grade with green luster, and the quality of yellow or dark brown is poor; Black is the best ornament for black tea, followed by crimson, and the quality of brown or taupe is poor. Green tea contains more tin and lead, and black tea contains more orange buds, all of which are high-grade teas; Pure green scented tea is of good quality. The tightness of tea strips is directly related to the freshness of fresh leaf tea. Fresh tea is tender, the rope is tight and strong, and the quality is good. Fresh tea elders have thick and loose ropes, which are tight and smooth. The shape of pearl tea should be round, the rounder, the thinner and heavier, and the better the quality; Flat tea (such as Longjing, Qihua and Dafang) should be flat. Straight, that piece of tea should be like melon seeds, with strips behind it.
(3) There are two ways to smell the aroma: dry smelling and making tea soup with water. Dry sniffing is to grab a handful of tea by hand and then put it on your nose to smell whether the aroma of tea is pure, smokeless, burnt, moldy and other abnormal smells. Tea soup has fragrance, and different kinds of tea have their own unique fragrance. For example, green tea is fresh and meaningful (like fried chestnuts); Black tea is thick and pure; Oolong tea is rich and quiet; Scented scented tea is the top grade. If the fragrance of tea is weak, low and stagnant, if it has a rough smell, it is defective.
(4) Look at the color of soup, that is, the color of tea. Different varieties and qualities of tea have different colors. Generally, green tea soup is clear, light green and bright. Black tea soup is ruddy and bright; Oolong tea is preferably orange or golden and bright; Pale yellow and bright scented tea is the best; Pressed tea is better with strong tea.
(5) Tea tastes strong, strong, fresh, sweet, mellow, bitter, astringent, light and sour. Green tea first feels a little astringent, and then turns sweet, such as those with olives. Black tea is rich, fresh, mellow and sweet. Oolong tea has the sweetness of red green tea; Scented tea is best fresh and delicious; Pressed tea is better and tastes mellow. All kinds of tea are plain, rough and have poor grass fragrance.
(6) Look at the tea brewed with boiling water at the bottom of the tea, which is called the bottom of the leaf. Tea with tender, multi-bud, soft, thick, even and complete leaves is good, while tea with thick, old, multi-edged, thin, miscellaneous and broken leaves is poor in quality. Leaf bottom color, green tea has green, yellow-green, bright and consistent quality; Those green patches, dark red stems and red leaves are of poor quality. The bottom of red tea leaves is copper red, bright, uniform and of good quality; Dark blue flowers are of poor quality. Oolong tea is better to be even green and slightly yellow and bright; Those brown and black ones are of poor quality.