How it is made and drunk
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Brick tea is boiled hard for a long period, strained, and churned with butter and salt until fully emulsified — traditionally in a tall wooden cylinder. It is drunk in quantity throughout the day, and functions in the diet as something closer to a broth than to a beverage in the Western sense.
Guest conventions
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
A guest's bowl is customarily topped up rather than emptied, and leaving it full or draining it entirely carries meaning. TeaHQ notes that such conventions exist and vary, without offering instruction on navigating them.
The trade that supplies it
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
The tea comes from Sichuan and Yunnan in compressed brick form, and the historic exchange routes between tea-growing areas and the plateau are the reason a Chinese agricultural product became a Himalayan dietary staple. The teas made for this trade — coarse, mature, heavily compressed — were designed for the journey and the preparation rather than for steeping.