White Tea Grades

White tea's grades are not tasting scores. The leaf is sorted at the picking basket, by what was plucked and from which plant, and grade names that sort.

Grade fixes each style by two measures: the pluck (single bud, bud with leaves, or leaf) and the cultivar (a big-bud clonal variety, or the old seed-grown population). China's national standard GB/T 22291-2017 codifies four products in descending order of bud content: 白毫银针 baihao yinzhen (silver needle), 白牡丹 bai mudan (white peony), 贡眉 gongmei, and 寿眉 shoumei.

Read the ladder plainly. Bud content and downy appearance fall as you move down it, and price falls with them. Silver needle is the dearest, shoumei the cheapest.

Grade sorts the leaf and sets the price. It is not a verdict on the cup. It is where a buyer starts, not where the judgment ends.

The four styles, from bud to leaf

The standard reads as a pluck ladder. Each rung takes coarser material than the one above, and each carries its own set of grade tiers.

Silver needle is buds only. Bai mudan keeps the bud and adds one or two leaves to it. Gongmei and shoumei are the leafier shoots and the leaf. Shoumei is the leafiest and the largest-volume category, often the leaf material that remains after the buds have been taken for silver needle and bai mudan.

The material becomes coarser as the tier count changes: two tiers at the top for silver needle, four in the middle, two again for shoumei at the foot.

The cultivar gate

Before the pluck matters, the plant does. Four cultivars carry most of the corpus, and one older population sits underneath the whole system.

The distinction that governs the standard is clonal versus seed-grown. Da Bai and Da Hao are clonal cultivars: vegetatively propagated, uniform, with big downy buds. Caicha is seed-propagated (有性群体种), genetically variable, small-budded, the local population from which the small-white leaf came. In Fuding, clonal Da Bai and Da Hao now cover the great majority of plantings, and true caicha has grown scarce.

That axis, clonal leaf against seed-grown shoot, is the one the next section turns on.

Gong mei and shou mei: the pair worth getting right

The two leafy categories are the ones the market has long muddled. Before 2017 the words gongmei and shoumei were used loosely, often interchangeably, with gongmei generally taken to mean a slightly better grade of the same leafy tea. The 2008 version of the standard defined only three products (silver needle, bai mudan, gongmei) and left shoumei unstandardized, which is why the usage stayed loose.

GB/T 22291-2017 drew a line, and it drew it by cultivar rather than by leaf coarseness.

Gongmei is reserved to caicha. The standard wording is "以群体种茶树品种的嫩梢为原料": made from the tender shoots of population-cultivar tea trees, and no other. Traditional gongmei was the first-flush caicha shoots, one bud with one leaf to one bud with two leaves.

Shoumei is the wider category. Its wording, "以大白茶、水仙或群体种茶树品种的嫩梢或叶片为原料", admits the shoots or leaves of Da Bai, Shui Xian, or caicha. So the leaf of the big-bud clonal cultivars falls under shoumei, and caicha may too.

Stated as a rule: all gongmei is caicha; shoumei is broader and takes in the clonal-cultivar leaf. The everyday belief that gongmei is simply a higher grade of shoumei is the pre-2017 market usage. The standard replaced it with a cultivar boundary.

The 2017 revision made two changes that pinned the pair apart. It added shoumei as its own product, with its own sensory and physicochemical specification. And it added a water-extract (水浸出物) floor to the physicochemical index. Because gongmei is now caicha-only, and caicha is scarce in Fuding, true caicha gongmei has become an uncommon tea.

Grades within a style

A style's tiers (特级 superior, then 一级, 二级, 三级 as they apply) sort within the style, not against the cup. A tier reads tenderness, bud proportion, evenness of the pluck, and appearance.

The standard also fixes a physicochemical index for each product: a moisture ceiling, a total-ash limit, and, added in the 2017 revision, the water-extract floor. The index sets what the material must meet; it does not rank flavor.

A within-style grade is an appearance-and-material sort. A 特级 bai mudan carries a higher bud proportion and a cleaner, more even pluck than a 三级 bai mudan. It does not certify a better cup, only a finer sort of leaf going in.

Grade, price, and the cup

Grade tracks the pluck and the appearance, and it sets the price. The all-bud silver needle at the top commands the most; the leaf-heavy shoumei at the foot the least.

It says nothing about the year, the origin county, the withering, or the storage. Those move the cup as much as the pluck does. A carefully made shoumei can outdrink a careless silver needle.

The Trust records grade as a measure of material, not a ranking of pleasure. A buyer reads it to know what was picked and what it should cost, then reads the rest for the cup.

Compressed cakes and aged labeling

Pressed white tea sits under a separate standard, GB/T 31751-2015 (紧压白茶, compressed white tea), published 3 July 2015 and in force 1 February 2016. It governs the pressing, not a new grade.

A compressed white tea is made from finished loose white tea as its raw material, then sorted (整理), blended (拼配), steam-pressed and shaped (蒸压定型), and dried (干燥). The practice is borrowed from puerh; cakes are typically pressed after the loose tea has rested about two years. The standard classes the result by the loose tea it was pressed from: 紧压白毫银针, 紧压白牡丹, 紧压贡眉, 紧压寿眉, and 紧压新工艺白茶 (compressed new-process white tea). Common forms are the round cake (饼) and the brick or square (砖). New-process white tea (新工艺白茶) is the one style here that departs from the two steps: created in 1968 by Wang Yisen at the Bailin tea factory, it adds a light rolling (轻揉捻) after withering that ordinary white tea does not have.

Age is a third claim, and the least governed. 老白茶 (aged white tea) is a market convention for tea stored roughly three years or more. Neither GB/T 22291 nor GB/T 31751 defines an age grade or certifies a vintage. An age claim rests on the production-date label required by general food-labeling rules, and on local or association standards in Fuding and Zhenghe, not on the two backbone standards. The pressed style and the raw-material grade are what the standards fix; the age is a separate claim a buyer must verify against the date.

The collector's saying "一年茶，三年药，七年宝" (one year tea, three years medicine, seven years treasure) belongs to that market talk about aging. It is a saying, not a grading rule and not a finding about health.