The Aroma Cup (Wen Xiang Bei): What the Tall Gongfu Cup Is For

An aroma cup (闻香杯, wen xiang bei, "smelling cup") is the tall, narrow cup in a gongfu cup pair. You pour the tea into it, tip it into the short drinking cup, then smell the empty aroma cup, which holds the scent of the tea as it cools. The pair is a Taiwanese invention from the early 1980s, made for fragrant oolongs. It's a pleasure rather than a necessity: a cup with a narrow mouth does much of the same job.

The first time most people see one, they assume it's for drinking and wonder why it's so small and awkward. It isn't for drinking at all. It's for the nose.

I have one pair, plain porcelain, and Dan Cong is what I bring it out for. That says most of what you need to know about when an aroma cup is worth the extra washing up.

Two cups, two jobs#

The pair is a wen xiang bei for smelling and a pin ming bei (品茗杯) for drinking, usually on a little saucer or tray together. The aroma cup is tall and narrow, so the warm tea touches a lot of porcelain and leaves a film of scent behind. The drinking cup is wide and low, so the tea cools to a sippable temperature quickly.

That split is the whole idea. Most cups have to compromise between showing off the aroma and being easy to drink from. A pair stops compromising.

Using a pair, step by step#

1. Warm both cups with hot water and empty them.
2. Pour the tea into the aroma cup, from the gaiwan or the fairness cup.
3. Cover it with the drinking cup, upside down, like a lid.
4. Flip the pair in one movement, so the drinking cup is now underneath and the aroma cup stands upside down inside it.
5. Lift the aroma cup. The tea runs into the drinking cup.
6. Smell the empty aroma cup, rolling it between your palms. Then drink.

Why the flip ends on the tray#

The flip looks like a magic trick and takes a few tries. Practise with cold water first.

Most spills have dull causes. An aroma cup filled to the brim has nowhere for the tea to go when the drinking cup sits on top, so stop a few millimetres short. Hold the pair by the drinking cup's foot and the aroma cup's base, not around the sides: thin porcelain full of hot tea is not something you want to grip. And flip with the wrist, quickly, rather than turning the pair slowly through ninety degrees, which is exactly when the gap between the rims opens.

What you notice in the empty cup#

The scent changes as the cup cools, and that's the point of keeping it in your hands. Hot, it gives the bright, high notes: flowers, fresh fruit. As it cools, the lower notes come forward, honey, sugar or roast. With a good oolong the cup still smells sweet minutes later.

It's also a quiet quality check. A tea that smells lovely in the gaiwan but leaves almost nothing in the aroma cup is often thinner than it seemed. One that perfumes the cup steep after steep usually has more depth. The general method is in how to taste tea.

Why Dan Cong is the tea for it#

Dan Cong is my favourite tea, and it is also the tea an aroma cup flatters most. Phoenix Mountain makes around 80 recognised aroma types, from the honey and orchid of Mi Lan Xiang to gardenia, almond and ginger flower. Those aromas aren't added. They come from the cultivar, from five rounds of shaking through the night while the leaf rests, and from a slow charcoal finish.

Oolong's uneven oxidation gives it high notes and low notes at once, and the balance between them shifts from steep to steep. A drinking cup gives you the blend. The empty aroma cup pulls it apart as it cools, top notes first, and lets you follow the change across a session rather than just noticing that steep four tasted different from steep two.

Dan Cong is also brewed hot and fast, 5–6 g per 100 ml at 90–95 °C with first steeps of 3–5 seconds, so each pour is small and arrives at the pair very hot. That suits the aroma cup well: plenty of scent rising off a little tea. The full recipe is in the gongfu brewing chart.

Teas that suit it, and teas that don't#

Porcelain or clay#

Porcelain, almost always. It doesn't absorb smells, so the only thing in the empty cup is the tea you just poured. Unglazed clay soaks up oils and slowly takes on the character of whatever goes through it. That's charming in a teapot kept for one tea and a nuisance in a cup whose whole job is to report honestly. A Dan Cong aroma cup that still remembers last week's shou is not reporting honestly.

Glazed stoneware is fine if the inside is fully glazed. Glass works, but it cools fast, so the scent fades before the low notes have had their turn.

Choosing a pair#

A few checks matter more than the decoration. The aroma cup must hold no more than the drinking cup, or the flip overflows. The drinking cup's rim has to sit comfortably over the aroma cup's mouth when upturned, which matched pairs do and mixed cups often don't. A thin, even rim on the drinking cup helps; a thick, rolled one makes a leaky lid.

Size follows the rest of your set. Gongfu drinking cups usually hold 30–60 ml, and the pair should suit the gaiwan you pour from: a 100 ml gaiwan fills two pairs comfortably. A white interior is useful in the drinking cup, where you want to see the colour of the liquor; the aroma cup can be any colour you like, since nobody looks into it.

Using two pairs to compare teas#

The fairest way to compare two teas is to brew them side by side: identical gaiwans, the same leaf weight, the same water and the same timings, ideally without knowing which is the expensive one. Two aroma cups make that comparison much clearer. Set the empty cups next to each other and smell them as they cool. The difference in how long each one holds its scent says a lot about the leaf.

Do you need one?#

No. A pair adds a step and a cup to wash, and for everyday brewing a single cup with a slightly narrowed mouth does most of the work. That's covered in choosing tea cups.

A pair earns its place when you drink a lot of fragrant oolong, when you're comparing teas side by side, or when you have guests and want to show them why people fuss over oolong at all. Add one once the basics of a gongfu tea set are in place, not before. Then keep it for the teas that deserve it; mine waits for Dan Cong.