The method
Sensory review is not about deciding whether you like a tea. It is about describing the same tea the same way twice.
An opinion moves with your mood, the weather and what you ate an hour ago, while a description does not have to.
So fix the variables you can control: leaf weight, water volume, water temperature and steeping time.
Use 5 grams of leaf in a 110ml gaiwan for oolong, and keep that ratio for every sample you compare.
A tea that looks thin at 3 grams per 110ml can look entirely different at 5, and you will never know which was right.
Smell the dry leaf first, then the wet leaf, then the empty cup, and write a line at each step.
Memory is the weakest instrument in the room. Three samples in, you are comparing against a guess.
Keep one tea aside as a reference and brew it alongside everything else, because it anchors the session.
Score if you like, but treat the score as a summary of your notes rather than the point of the exercise.
Repeat the session on another day, since any judgement that survives two days is worth keeping.
Setting up
Water matters more than most people expect, so use soft neutral water and the same water every time.
Heavily mineralised water flattens aroma, and chlorinated tap water does the same thing in a different way.
Bring it to a full boil for roasted oolong, and let it fall to about 95°C for green style oolong.
A gaiwan is the most honest vessel here, because it holds nothing back and it cools at a predictable rate.
Preheat the gaiwan and the cups, or the first infusion will read cooler than it actually was.
Time every infusion: 30 seconds for the first, then add 15 or 20 seconds as the leaf opens.
Take the sample from the middle of the batch, not from the top, where broken leaf and dust collect.
For a large bag, mix from several spots before weighing, or you are reviewing one fragment of it.
Work in a room without cooking smells, smoke or perfume, and give the bench a wipe first.
Four samples per session is plenty, because by the sixth your palate is not the instrument it was.
What to score
Start with the dry leaf: how tightly it is rolled, whether the colour is even, how much stem is in it.
Then the dry aroma, taken from the warmed vessel rather than from the bag, which smells mostly of storage.
After the rinse, smell the wet leaf, which is where roasted oolong tells you whether the firing was clean.
Judge the liquor for colour and clarity first, and only then for thickness across the tongue.
Oolong should carry weight in the middle of the mouth rather than flavour only at the front.
Watch for bitterness that arrives and leaves, which is different from bitterness that sits and stays.
The finish is where a Wuyi tea earns its price, since rock character, or yan yun（岩韵）, shows up late and lingers.
Count the infusions. A good oolong is still giving something at the seventh, while a weak one stopped at the third.
Finish with the spent leaf, because whole, pliable and evenly coloured means good material handled carefully.
Name faults out loud: scorched, sour, stale from damp storage, and the raw green note of under-firing.
Avoiding bias
The biggest single bias is the price tag, so remove it along with the wrapper before anyone pours.
Blind tasting sounds fussy until the day an expensive sample loses to a cheap one in front of you.
Order matters too. Put lighter, greener oolongs before darker, more roasted ones, or the second tastes of nothing.
Rinse your mouth between samples and take a short break after every third one.
Three to five people give a steadier result than one, even when two of them disagree with each other.
Run the session in the morning if you can, before coffee, and never straight after a spicy meal.
The first infusion is often misleading because the leaf is still tight, so judge from the second onward.
If a tea surprises you in either direction, brew it again before writing a single word about it.
Do not review a tea you have already decided about, since everyone can taste a conclusion reached earlier.
Write the note the same day, then read it a week later and see whether it still means anything.