How to Track Your Tea: Leaves, Steeps & Tasting Notes
A tea journal has two halves: the leaves you own and the sessions you brew from them — with scores consistent enough that a spring Long Jing and an aged sheng pu-erh can sit in the same system. Tea collections sprawl faster than any other drink shelf: a tin from a trip, three samples from an order, a gift you can't read the label of. Six months later, nobody remembers which one was the revelation.
Log the leaf first
One entry per tea: type (green, white, oolong, black, pu-erh…), producer or shop, origin, and harvest or flush if the label says — spring versus autumn pickings of the same garden can drink like different teas. Storage age matters at the extremes too: greens fade in months while good pu-erh is just warming up at ten years. In Crumble's tea journal (a free add-on) your leaves live on a shelf, and with Crumble Plus scanning the packaging fills in the details.
What to record per tea type
The scoring axes stay the same for every tea; the detail worth writing down shifts by type:
- Green — water temperature is the whole story; log it every session, because 70°C and 85°C make two different teas from the same leaf.
- Black — flush and origin do the heavy lifting; note whether you drank it plain, since milk rewrites body and astringency.
- Oolong — roast level and the infusion arc; where the session peaked matters more than any single number.
- Pu-erh — sheng or shou, plus age; these are the teas the yearly revisit was invented for.
The shelf half of the journal earns its keep here: since greens fade while pu-erh only improves, a dated shelf doubles as a drink-this-first list — work down the fresh greens, let the cakes sleep.
Score sessions on tea's own six axes
- Sweetness — from delicate (white teas) to malty-honeyed (Yunnan blacks).
- Astringency — the drying grip; spine in moderation, punishment past it.
- Body — water-light to broth-thick; aged and roasted teas climb here.
- Aroma — orchid oolongs, smoky lapsang, stone fruit Darjeelings; half of tea is the nose.
- Umami — the savory depth of shaded Japanese greens; gyokuro's whole argument.
- Finish — the returning sweetness (hui gan) that the best teas leave behind.
Tea adds one wrinkle no other drink has: the same leaves change across infusions. Score the session as a whole, then spend your free-text line on the arc — "peaks at steep three, mineral by five" is the most tea-specific note you can take.
A worked example: one oolong, three steeps
Say tonight's tea is a charcoal-roasted Tieguanyin, brewed gongfu-style. The shelf entry already holds the fixed facts — oolong, the shop it came from, autumn harvest — so the session note only has to carry what happened in the cup:
"Steep one: roast in front, body medium, sweetness hiding. Steep two is the peak — orchid pushes through the char and the finish turns honeyed and long. Steep three is thinner but cleaner; astringency finally shows at the edges. Scored the session on steep two."
Four sentences, written in under a minute, and it does everything a tea note needs: the six axes get one honest set of session scores (aroma and finish high, astringency low), and the free text captures the arc. Six months from now, deciding whether to reorder, that note answers the question the star rating alone can't.
Tea houses count too
Gongfu bars, Japanese tea rooms, the café with the surprisingly serious oolong list — venues are free to track on Crumble like any spot: rate what you drank, wishlist the tea houses you haven't visited, and share finds with your circle through the map. Tea pilgrimage through Taiwan or Kyoto? It becomes a trip with its own recap.
Habits for a tea journal that survives
- Standardize your brewing baseline. Note your default (e.g. gongfu, 95°C, quick steeps) once in the shelf entry; only log deviations per session.
- First session per tea is the honest one. Score every new tea once with your full attention; daily-driver brews afterwards don't all need entries.
- Note water when it surprises you. The same tea on holiday tap water can drop two points. One word ("hotel water") saves future confusion.
- Revisit aged teas yearly. A dated annual entry per pu-erh cake is a time-lapse of its development — the most rewarding long game in tea.
Three habits that kill tea journals
- Grading every steep. A gongfu session can run eight infusions; score each one and journaling becomes homework. One session score plus a line about the arc is the version you'll still be doing next year.
- Jargon paralysis. You don't need to know "hui gan" to notice returning sweetness — "gets sweeter after I swallow" is the same observation. Write what you taste in your own words; the vocabulary arrives on its own.
- Backlog guilt. Missed a month of sessions? Don't reconstruct them from memory. Log tonight's pot and move on — a journal with gaps beats an abandoned one every time.
None of these traps are tea-specific — they sink food logs and wine notes just the same, which is why our guide to food diary apps keeps returning to the same test: whatever you track, the habit only survives if logging takes less time than brewing.
The rest of the shelf
The same journal model covers matcha (its own guide — the workflow differs), specialty coffee, wine, whisky, and beer. One app for everything you steep and pour, all free — Crumble Plus adds the AI label scan.
Frequently asked questions
What should I write in a tea journal?
Per tea: what it is (type, producer, origin, harvest if known) and how you brewed it (leaf amount, water temperature, steep time). Per session: scores on consistent axes — sweetness, astringency, body, aroma, umami, finish — plus one line of free text. The consistent axes are what let a Dan Cong from March meet a Darjeeling from June on equal terms.
Is there an app for tea tasting notes?
Yes — Crumble's free tea add-on keeps your leaves on a shelf and logs each session against them with a six-axis flavor radar built for tea, astringency and umami included. With Crumble Plus, scan the packaging and the AI fills in producer and style.
How do I track multiple infusions of the same tea?
Score the session, not each steep — but note how the tea moved: good oolongs and pu-erhs change character across five or more infusions, and "opens floral, turns mineral by steep four" is exactly the kind of line worth writing down. If one steep was the peak, say which.
What is astringency in tea?
The drying, mouth-puckering grip — from tannins, the same family that structures red wine. A little gives tea its spine; too much usually means the water was too hot or the steep too long. Tracking it separately from bitterness is what makes tea notes precise.