Aged white tea cake: breaking it and brewing it
5 October 2025 · 2 min read
I bought a small compressed cake of white tea, said to be about six years old, 100 g pressed into a disc the size of a saucer. I had only ever had white tea loose, so the first obstacle was mechanical: how to get 5 g off a disc without turning it into dust. I used a blunt letter opener, pushing in flat from the edge along the layers rather than stabbing down, and still the first attempt gave me a pile of fragments and a lot of powder. The second, going in slower and levering more gently, produced three flat flakes that weighed 5.2 g together. It gets easier; the cake loosens as you work into it.
First brew, week one: 5 g in the gaiwan, water at 90 °C, a 10 second rinse that I drank out of curiosity (sweet, dusty), then 15, 20, 30, 45, 60 and 90 seconds. The early steeps were dark amber and tasted of dried apricot and hay, with a honeyed thickness that is nothing like fresh white tea. There was also a flat, cardboard note in the first two steeps that I put down to the cake having been sealed for years. By the fourth steep it had gone and the cup was clean.
The dust was not wasted. I collected about 2 g of powder from the first breaking and brewed it in a filter bag at 85 °C for 40 seconds. Stronger, more astringent, and more medicinal than the flakes, with the cardboard note much more obvious. Dust gives up everything at once. Drinkable, not pleasant.
By week four, with the cake wrapped loosely in paper in a tin and opened six times, the cardboard had disappeared from the flakes entirely, even in the first steep. The apricot had come forward and there was a cooling sensation in the throat after the third steep that had not been there before. Compressed teas apparently need to breathe after years sealed, and a month in paper did it.
What I would do differently: break off a month’s worth at once, store the flakes loose in a small tin, and leave the rest of the cake wrapped, so the opened portion airs out while the rest keeps. And buy a proper pick, because the letter opener has a bent tip now.