The method
Reprocessed tea covers scented, compressed and otherwise treated leaf, and each type needs its own method.
The question is never only whether the tea is good, but whether the scent actually belongs to the leaf.
Weigh everything. Three grams to 150ml works for jasmine tea, and 7 grams to 120ml for compressed dark tea.
Use 85 to 90°C for scented green base teas, and water straight off the boil for compressed post-fermented ones.
Keep water, weight and time identical across the samples in a flight, or the comparison means nothing at all.
Smell the dry leaf, then the wet leaf, then the empty cup after it has cooled for a minute.
For scented tea the cooled cup is the real test, because added flavour lingers there and real jasmine does not.
Keep one sample you know well and brew it every session as a fixed reference point.
Write what you smelled and what you tasted, and keep your opinions out of the notes entirely.
Run the flight twice on separate days before you settle on any description at all.
Setting up
Use soft neutral water, because scented tea is fragile and mineral water flattens the aroma immediately.
Boil and stand for scented types, and use water straight off the boil for compressed dark tea.
A porcelain gaiwan is the right vessel for scented tea, and a small one of around 100ml at that.
For compressed tea use a larger vessel of 120 to 150ml, and rinse the leaf once for 5 seconds first.
Steep scented tea for 1 to 2 minutes, and start compressed tea at about 20 seconds.
Break compressed samples along the layers rather than crushing them, or you will brew dust and stems.
Take material from several places in a cake, because the outside and the centre are different teas by now.
Keep the room neutral, since scented tea picks up any smell in the air and you will blame the leaf.
Do not review scented tea and compressed tea in the same flight, as the two have nothing in common.
Cap the session at four samples or one hour, whichever of the two comes first.
What to score
For jasmine tea, count the scenting rounds when the seller states them, usually somewhere between three and nine.
More rounds cost more money, but they do not guarantee a better result, so taste rather than count.
The aroma should be in the leaf rather than on it, so smell it dry and again after three infusions.
Tea that smells strong in the bag and weak in the cup was probably sprayed rather than properly scented.
Judge the base tea separately, sipping past the flowers to ask whether the green tea underneath is any good.
For compressed tea, look for a clean liquor with no cloudiness, which would mean the pressing was done wet.
Check whether the compression is even, since a cake hard at the edges and soft in the middle ages unevenly.
Sweetness and thickness matter more than aroma in compressed tea, because aroma fades with storage anyway.
Inspect the spent leaf of both types, since scented tea should still look like tea and not like potpourri.
Faults to name: perfumy, artificial, cardboard from poor storage, and any sour note in a compressed cake.
Avoiding bias
Price and packaging do most of the damage here, because gift boxes in this category are often elaborate.
Take everything out of its tin or wrapper, and number the samples before anyone in the room sees them.
Brew unscented samples before scented ones, since scented tea leaves a film the next sample has to fight.
Use separate vessels if you can, because scented tea leaves an aroma in porcelain that survives a rinse.
Rinse your mouth and wait, since floral notes build across a session and stop being distinguishable.
Review in the morning, and skip perfume or scented soap on the day that you do it.
Do not judge a scented tea on the first infusion, which is usually the loudest and the least useful.
Ask someone else to pour and number, so that nobody at the table knows what they are drinking.
Re-taste anything that surprised you, because the surprise may be the previous sample still in your mouth.
If a scented tea tastes identical across five infusions, that is a finding rather than a compliment.