You may have noticed that white tea cakes, or compressed white tea, now seem to be a thing. Attractively packaged with eye-catching artwork, they can certainly elevate the tea experience.
But, if we're looking for the best teas as far as quality and flavor go, how do they compare? Should we buy compressed, rather than loose, white tea? And really, what's the point of compressing those beautiful, large, fluffy, white tea leaves?
In this series, I take a closer look at white tea cakes:
- Why they are made
- What happens as the compressed leaves age
- Reasons that loose leaves may be preferred, historically and today
- Examples of white tea cakes
So, why compress white tea leaves in the first place?
If you've ever tried measuring out huge, fluffy, loose white tea leaves in a tea-measuring spoon, you can appreciate why they might be compressed into molds and made into cakes!
However, additional advantages exist:
- Ease of transport and storage
- Novelty
- Possible quality improvement with aging
- Command higher price
Ease of transport and storage:
Leaves that have been only withered remain large, bulky, and fragile. Because they take up a lot of room, they are hard to package. And, because the large leaves are fragile, they have to be protected during shipping and in storage.
As shown here, each individual bag of white tea leaves must be packaged in its own box to prevent breakage.
Each case of white tea, then, contains relatively little tea when compared to how many bags of less-fragile tea can be piled into a box.
Compressing the unwieldy leaves into cakes solves all these problems! (And is partly why, centuries ago, China sent tea bricks along those trade routes.)
Novelty:
According to Jingyi Huang (2021), white tea cakes didn't even exist until 2006, when tea farmers experimented with them. With savvy marketing and a solid product, novelties can become mainstays.
Change in quality with aging:
It's sometimes thought that tea cakes are superior to loose leaves in terms of quality, especially as they age.
During years in storage, the compressed leaves may become less astringent, develop intensity, and undergo changes in caffeine levels as well as polyphenol types and levels (changes that alter flavor and health benefits). These things vacillate, so one type of polyphenol may increase for so many years and then decrease. If you have a tea cake and drink a bit of it once a year, you'll have a different tea composition every year.
However, the quality of the leaves used for the cakes may vary, depending on the tea farmer's and producer's opinions on the matter.
To make compressed white tea, tea leaves are first withered and dried—which makes white tea. But then those leaves are softened with steam, shaped into a cake using a mold, and dried, which makes the tea a reprocessed product.
That steaming step affects the tender white tea leaves, as does the physical act of compressing them into a mold. The temperature used to dry the cake also impacts quality; one study, for instance, found that 80°C resulted in better aroma esters, taste, and sweetness (Dong-chun Lin et al. 2022).
As Jingyi Huang discovered, some tea farmers don't want to turn high-quality (and already valuable) loose leaves into cakes, a process that well might degrade the tea.
However, since a compressed tea may improve with age, other options open:
Typically, farmers will prefer either pressing a decent quality fresh white tea, however usually lower grade such as Shou Mei or Gong Mei, and letting the cake age into something better, or pressing a good enough just aged white tea (around 3 or 4 years old) and start drinking it right away, or the next year or continue aging it. (Jingyi Huang 2021)
Converting an okay product into something better seems a winning proposition. The only downside might be having to store the tea while it ages.
Command higher price:
Aged teas are perceived as more valuable and therefore are priced accordingly. But are the teas actually worth more?
Of course we can argue that some teas—whether tea cakes or loose leaves—are truly worth more than others. Take those that are expertly made with high-quality (or rare!) leaves by skilled producers, shown to be free of impurities, and made in limited quantities. Such teas can understandably command more money than those that fall outside these parameters.
Producing tea cakes from loose white tea requires more processing time. The cakes must be stored, often for years. Such investments in the product will be reflected in the price consumers pay.
But are aged cakes made with less-good leaves worth more than the highest-quality loose leaves?
My first response is no. I personally would choose the less-processed loose leaves, those that were grown and produced to be the best of teas, without needing "improvement."
But then again, I could argue the other way around.
Consider oolong tea. Although larger leaves are often considered of lower quality than the prized youngest and smallest leaves, those larger leaves are needed for oolong. These more mature leaves bring the necessary flavor and are able to withstand the many production steps that oolongs require. It's largely the expert processing that results in amazing—and often expensive—oolong teas. How is that so different from the expertise of choosing the right leaf, compression steps, and period of aging to produce a white tea cake?
We also can't overlook the social construct, wherein a tea may be judged by someone influential.
Although Kunbing Xiao's research focuses on rock tea of northern Fujian Province, this sentence may apply to any type of tea, including white tea cakes:
[I]n the context of modern consumerism growers/producers compete commercially and for prestige by making claims for the irreducible quality of their tea and persuading consumers, and sometimes other growers/producers, to accept their claims. (2017)
Tastings by tea experts, governmental agencies, and tea competitions certainly help to distinguish the finer teas from ordinary and subpar teas, but presentation, expectation, bias, close-mindedness, and other factors definitely skew judgment. We know how easily we can be influenced if a friend hands us a cup of tea and tells us how much they love this incredible tea. We want to agree with them, if nothing more than to validate them.
That social construct is powerful stuff.
In my next post, I'll delve deeper into what happens as compressed white tea leaves age.
Sources:
–Dong-chun Lin, et al., "Effect of drying temperature on the quality of pressed white tea cake from withered leaves," Food Science 43(15):109–116. August 30, 2022.
–Jingyi Huang, "A love affair with loose leaf (aged) white tea," Serene Tea, October 31, 2021.
–Kunbing Xiao, "The taste of tea," Journal of Material Culture 22(1):3–18. 2017.
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