Did you know white tea can have a piling step

[Sweetestdew]

I was talking with a maker in Dian Tou and he mentioned a piling step. We were speaking in chinese so I had to double check i heard correctly but indeed he did.
When i went home I even found a study about it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 7524000269

When i asked other makers about it they just seemed confused, which im not sure is because of my still lacking chinese or because they dont do it.
I havent really heard of other vendors talking about it either.

[Rob]

I have heard about this processing step too - a light fermentation after withering to remove grassiness. It sounds similar to the yellowing process, but appears to be less intensive for white tea.

Very few sellers mention this process, and some seem to confuse it as an accelerated ageing process for teas like shou puerh or young brown shou mei (but perhaps, it is to some extent similar). I wonder whether it is a traditional process, or a modern innovation - also unsure how commonplace the practice is.

[aet]

that's the way they make aged white....the fake aged , I mean.

[LeoFox]

However, unlike the more traditional process of white tea, producing browned-white tea goes through a process that looks like this:


The tea leaves are plucked and harvested, before being spread thick on large bamboo mats. The tea also air-dries in the sun, but since teas are packed on the mats more densely, they create hot-humidity. The hotter the pile of leaves become, the quicker the moisture evaporates from the leaves — making the pile more humid in a continual cycle. In this continual cycle, the leaves turn brown.


Derek explained that this process of making traditional white tea is very technical, it also takes more skill to master — whereas processing browned-white tea is not nearly as technical, it results in a much larger yield. Tea farmers and producers can move a lot more product onto the wholesaler, much quicker. The appearance and quality aren't nearly as important with browned-white tea as it is greened-white tea, because most of the flaws in processing are masked when the tea is browned in processing. It’s not only cheaper to process tea this way, it also makes more money.

https://www.theoolongdrunk.com/single-p ... -white-tea

[pathlesstaken]

These are different piling steps to the one described in the paper, aren't they?

[Rob]

The (fake aged) brown shou mei has a hotter and more humid treatment. The Oolong Drunk article suggests it is made by withering in thicker piles to create something a bit like black (red) tea.

But there can also be a slightly different piling process for young green/grey white teas - usually bud-heavy pickings such as silver needle or mudan wang. The piling takes place after initial sun/shade withering, so only when the leaves are much drier - and cannot produce much heat either. At the end, the finished tea can still look fairly green - and it probably won't be sold as aged white tea.

[Sweetestdew]

As some have mentioned this is different from the piling of browned tea and produces normal white.

btw, I dont think the browning happens as much as some people think it does. When I've asked makers about it they have told me they have some and let me try it, but I think there is no shortage of natural aged whites to need artificially aged. Maybe some years ago when whites first got popular they artificially aged, but in the last few years the white tea popularity has slowed a bit and makers say they have plenty of whites in their warehouse from previous years.
Also the browned whites have a clear taste difference that they dont care for.
This is at least what Ive gotten from the makers I've spoken to.