Tea Spotlight: Brick Aged White Tea
Our Brick Aged White Tea is one of our staff favorites. In this article, we explore how this tea is made and why it is one of our favorite teas to enjoy.
First let’s talk a little bit about how this tea is made. After allowing freshly produced white tea leaves to mature for 6-12 months, the tea leaves are lightly steamed in order to make them pliable. The leaves are then pressed into a mold that can be a wide variety of sizes and shapes, usually either brick shaped or disc (which is commonly referred to as “cake”) shaped. Finally, the compressed leaves are carefully wrapped with tea paper and stored in a special tea room to help naturally age the tea, giving the tea a richer and more unique flavor.
Similar to a fine wine, well produced and properly stored compressed tea leaves can continue to develop better flavor and stronger complexities over time. Our Brick Aged White Tea continues to develop new intricacies as it matures. In general, you can expect this tea to have an richer, sweeter, and more woodsy quality to it then our selection of non-compressed white teas such as White Peony King, Silver Needle King, and Wild White Tea (although we do offer a compressed Wild White Tea Cake, which you can find under the “Tea Cakes” category of our “Tea” heading on this website).
Compressed teas, such as our Brick Aged White Tea, have a long history in Chinese culture. Originally teas were compressed and pressed into bricks to help preserve the quality of the tea leaves over long periods of time and long distances. Without the modern convenience of foil bags for flavor preservation and to help with space restrictions when traveling, loose leaves would quickly lose flavor. The compressed tea bricks helped to not only preserve but even enhance the flavor over time.
Today tea cakes or bricks offer a great means to enjoy both the history of tea and the unique flavor experience that is not found from the production of traditional white, green, wu-long, and black tea. We offer our Brick Aged White Tea in half ounce and two ounce bags.