Pounding to a paste (mortar-beaten leaf)

The categories this step defines

In tea, processing is not a modifier applied to a category — it is what creates the category. These are the types that exist because this step exists.

• Dark tea and pu-erh — Post-fermentation: microbial wet-piling (shou) or extended natural ageing (sheng).

What it is

Leaf is steamed and, while it is still hot and fully wet, tipped into a stone or wooden mortar and beaten. What the beating does is not what rolling does: rolling ruptures cells and twists each piece into a form it keeps as a separate piece, while pounding works the whole batch until the pieces lose their individual boundaries and the mass becomes cohesive enough to be moulded like dough. Leaf structure is destroyed rather than shaped. The paste is then formed by hand or in a small mould — into discs, coins, cakes or bars — dried slowly, and in most surviving practice held for a long time afterwards, during which a microbial change works inward through a body that has almost no internal air. Two consequences follow from the paste stage and they are the reason the operation is recorded separately. The first is physical: a pounded cake has no leaves in it to come apart, so it cannot be flaked with a pick the way a pressed cake can, and it is broken by snapping or dropped into water whole. The second is that the operation is only possible on leaf that has never been dried. Compression can be applied to a finished tea years after it was made; pounding has one window, immediately after the steam, and a maker who misses it has made loose tea instead.

Also transliterated as: dochi, tteok cha forming.

What it does to the leaf

Beats hot, undried steamed leaf until cell and leaf structure is destroyed and the batch coheres as a single plastic mass, which can then be moulded and dried as one body rather than as compacted separate pieces.

What it does to the cup

Gives a dense, slow-yielding body that resists over-extraction and is normally boiled rather than steeped. Because there is very little air inside the formed piece, any later microbial change works in from the surface and the interior and exterior of an old cake can taste noticeably unalike.

Variants that matter

Ways this step is carried out that produce genuinely different results, rather than regional names for the same thing.

Coin forming

Small discs with a hole through the middle, which is a storage and carrying feature rather than a decorative one — the pieces are strung.

Bar and brick forming

The same paste pressed into a larger rectangular body. More common where the tea is a household staple than where it is a revival product.

Pounded then pressed

Some practice pounds only until the mass coheres and then finishes it in a mould under weight, which borrows the second half of `process-compression`. The two operations are not exclusive and the boundary between them is a matter of how far the beating is taken.

Other steps at the Pressing stage

• Cake wrapping and tong packing — The paper, the bamboo shell and the stack are part of how the tea ages, not packaging around a finished object — and the wrapper is also the document.
• Compression — Steaming loose leaf and pressing it into cakes, bricks, nests or logs — originally for transport, now for ageing.
• Log packing (Qian Liang) — Steamed dark tea rammed into a woven casing and compressed by rolling and treading the whole column, producing a tea shaped like a pillar rather than a cake.
• Steam softening before pressing (zheng ya) — Dry leaf is briefly steamed so it can be compressed without shattering — a few seconds too many and the cake has been part-cooked before it starts its life.
• Stone pressing — Forming a cake under a shaped stone weighted by a person standing on it, which gives a looser cake than a hydraulic press does.