Waterway is a common language used by tea lovers when tasting tea. There is no accurate and authoritative official definition, and there are not many unified standards and consensus. But it does not prevent tea lovers from understanding waterways. In order to make it easier for tea lovers to understand and communicate, the summary of the waterway is simplified to make it easier for tea lovers to experience and understand.
The waterway is the touch of tea soup, which is different from the feeling of tea soup, which is easy to be confused with the soup.The waterway is mainly expressed as thin and thick, which is the sensory expression of the tea soup flowing through the mouth and throat. We often use delicate and rough to describe the water performance of tea products. Simply speaking from the tenderness of raw materials. The water path of tea with high tenderness is thin, and the water path of tea with low tenderness will be thicker. Tea lovers can easily feel the roughness and fineness of the waterway when they compare the thick and old yellow tea with the tea with better quality and tenderness.
There are many factors affecting waterways. Such as the tenderness, endoplasm, process, storage, brewing and water use of tea products. Putting aside the external factors of tea products, we only discuss the factors of tea products. Tea products with relatively thick waterways have coarse and old raw materials, weak internal quality, lignification, and lack of flavor. The tea products with narrow waterways have high-quality raw materials, high tenderness, rich inner quality, and most of them are tea products with good flavor.
Yunnan Pu’er tea is relatively complicated. The thick and thin waterways are only one of the sensory indicators of tea products, and cannot fully represent the overall quality of tea products. For example, Laobanzhang waterway is not as delicate as Mansong. The water path of tea with large leaf shape is not as delicate as that of tea with small leaf shape. Therefore, the tea waterways in Yiwu and Yibang leaflet-shaped areas are more delicate than those in other areas.
