‘Spooning’ Tea – Taste-testing in a nutshell
I had an email recently from a friend in the US. He was looking for sets of aroma cups to use for tea comparisons, and was asking me if I could find him some. I told him that, for convenience, we usually use ceramic spoons to compare tea, and that gave me the inspiration for this post.
The standard spoons used in Taiwan are deep, ladle-style porcelain spoons. Plastic and metal versions are also available, but don’t work as well to showcase the aroma of the teas. The porcelain, much like a gaiwan, also holds heat better, which helps maintain the aroma as well. The best spoon to use should be neutral white, as should the bowl
used to steep the tea. (As a general rule, always use a white background for comparing tea leaf – dry or wet – or ‘tea soup’ (the liquid itself) so that you can make a better judgement of the color. Also, strong natural sunlight is the preferred lighting).
When preparing teas for testing, get matching bowls for each sample. For every 150cc (5 oz.) of water, add 3g (1/10th oz) of tea. The important point is to get the same amount of tea (by weight) for each sample to maintain uniformity.
Then fill each bowl to the brim with just-boiled water, and let them sit for 6 minutes. Also, put the spoon(s) into a bowl of their own and fill it to the brim with boiling water. This cleans and preheats 
them so that they won’t cool the tea quickly when you dip them into the bowl. During this time you can check the color and the leaf as it steeps.
When you’re ready to start spooning, simply take your
spoon out of it’s bowl and gently wipe it sideways across the lip of the bowl. You want to make sure there’s as little water on the spoon as possible so that you won’t dilute the tea you’ve prepared. 
Stir the tea gently with the spoon, then lift it out and hold the back of the spoon up to your nose (watch for drips). The aroma from the back of the spoon will radiate out in all directions, allowing you to pick out more delicate nuances as you develop your nasal palate. From the front of the spoon, the aroma concentrates inward and ‘muddies’ the smell, requiring greater concentration to figure it out.
After you’ve checked color and aroma, it’s time to move on to actually tasting the tea. Experts will put about 1/2 a spoonful into their personal cup, slurp it noisily,
swish it around, then spit it out. If you are going to be sampling lots of teas for extended periods, you’ll quickly understand why they don’t drink it! (I usually drink samples – hate to waste tea!).
So, now you can go out and impress your friends with your ‘professional’ tea-sampling technique! More importantly, you can start comparing and sampling different teas, and ‘sharin’ the love’ of the world’s most popular beverage!