Reference point
Open a packet of plain green tea and smell the dry leaves before brewing.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Dry green, slightly smoky, with a note of pan-roasted grass and a faint astringency at the end of the breath.
Quite different from brewed tea. The dry leaf is the concentrated, still state; the tea in the cup is the dilute, moving one. Smelling the leaf gives you the raw material; smelling the cup gives you the result.
It keeps for a very long time in a closed tin, which is why an old tin of tea is still recognisable years later.
How to smell it
Tip a few leaves into your palm, breathe warm air over them and smell at once — the moisture makes the compounds rise more strongly. It is exactly what experienced tea buyers do, and it has a physical basis.
Why this one is hard
Because most people know only the smell of brewed tea and have never deliberately smelled the dry leaf. The two are different enough to need separate entries, but the brain usually merges them.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Dry green tea leaf
Green family
Tea has been through fire, so it has a roasted note; hay is only sun-dried, so it is purely honey and dust. Fire is the whole difference.
Scientific note
Pan-firing the tea stops the oxidising enzymes and keeps the leaf green. The heat of firing also produces pyrazines, which give a roasted note, and a small amount of furans. The longer the firing, the clearer the roast and the further the green recedes — that is the whole difference between green tea and more processed teas.
In Vietnamese life
Plain green tea from Thai Nguyen is the reference for tea drinkers in northern Vietnam. Smelling the dry leaf before buying is a default ritual at tea markets, and sellers always spread the leaves into the customer’s hand rather than leaving them in the bag.