How to Brew White Tea Water, leaf
and patience

The gaiwan is a lidded bowl, and the house’s everyday way with white tea. Warm it first. Put in 5g of leaf and pour water at 90 to 95°C over it, then pour that first water straight off: it wakes the leaf and lets you smell it. Steep the first real infusion for thirty to forty-five seconds and pour it all out, leaving nothing in the bowl. Make each infusion after that a little shorter at first, then let them lengthen again as the leaf tires. A good white tea gives many infusions; the later ones are often the sweetest.

Silver Needle and young White Peony are delicate: water toward the lower end of the range keeps them bright. Shou Mei and older cakes take water straight off the boil.

For a table of people, or a long day of work, put 15 to 25g in a large pot, pour hot water straight over it, and pour off as you drink. When the pot is empty, fill it again. White tea is forgiving in a big pot and does not turn bitter easily; an aged cake holds its sweetness from morning to night. This is how a hotel lounge or a tea house can pour one tea all day.

Boiling is the winter method, and it is for cakes three years and older. Put about 20g into cold water, bring it up, simmer for about three minutes and let it settle before pouring through a strainer. The pot comes out deep, dark and sweet. Aged cakes take kindly to a little tangerine peel when boiled, and in the old house a piece of rock sugar sometimes went into the winter pot. Taste it plain first.

An aged cake is pressed tight. Work a tea knife or pick into the edge and lever the leaf off in layers, so that the leaves stay whole; crushed leaf brews muddy and fast. Let the broken leaf rest in the air for a while before brewing if you can.

In a gaiwan, use water straight off the boil, wake the leaf and pour that water away, and expect the first infusions to be lighter than you think: compressed leaf opens slowly. Let later infusions run longer. When the gaiwan has given what it can, the spent leaf can go into a pot and be simmered for a last, sweet cup. For a single cake over several years, write down the year you opened it and how it poured; that is how a collector learns a tea. Aged white tea explains what the years do.

Silver Needle. A gaiwan or a glass, with water toward the lower end of the range, so the buds stay bright and the down does not stew. In a glass the needles stand upright in the water, which is half the pleasure.

White Peony. A gaiwan. Young White Peony is floral and fresh; give it short steeps. An older White Peony cake can take water straight off the boil.

Gong Mei and Shou Mei. A gaiwan with water straight off the boil, or the big pot for a table. These are the fullest of the white teas and the most forgiving.

Aged cakes. A gaiwan first, to taste the tea as it is; then, for cakes three years and older, the boiling pot. Spring teas suit mornings and summer; autumn teas suit afternoons, and the aged ones are boiled in winter.

A gaiwan, a glass, a large pot and a kettle are all the house uses day to day. The water is boiled in silver; the cups at the table are Jizhou ware, tortoiseshell glaze over dark clay, each one different. None of this is required. What matters is a vessel that pours cleanly and does not hold on to the last infusion, and water freshly boiled. The collection shows the silver kettle and the cups.

Good spring water is best; filtered water works well. Purified, deionised water flattens the tea. The house boils its water in silver: on the mountain the spring water was acid, and the silver softened it. Whatever the kettle, use water freshly brought to the boil, not water boiled again and again.

In summer, steep a pot of white tea in cool water overnight and drink it the next morning. It comes out clean, sweet and gentle.