On the India Tea Collective WhatsApp group, a recent chat was about sourcing compressed tea cakes from Assam. It got me thinking about how much has changed in recent years. Back in 2019, when I started writing this column, single-estate or single-origin tea was new. There were small pockets of tea connoisseurs, mostly those who had stumbled upon a superlative Darjeeling that had changed how they perceived tea. Now, gong fu set-ups with wooden trays and gaiwans are a familiar sight, and easily available. In the last few years, tea producers are offering more than the standard staples of CTC and orthodox tea, and equally, there’s a growing number of tea drinkers who are seeking it in India.
But tea cakes are almost an uber-speciality. Ranchi-based Ketlee, run by Susmit Pratik, was one of the earliest Indian brands to offer them. It started working with wild tea farmers in Manipur back in 2018. They produced cakes that while respectful of the Chinese style, were adapted for the Indian palate—sun-dried and more oxidised, producing caramel notes. Ketlee has since added a maocha from the Dooars and pu’erh from Mizoram to the catalogue. As prices go, these pu’erh cakes are expensive, upwards of ₹2,000 for a cake which is just short of 200g, but that’s justified by the work that goes into making it.
Back on the group, the conversation is around a small batch of tea cakes by Gauripur Tea, from Golaghat in Assam. A few cakes from 2024 are available (100g at ₹1,100) and quickly picked up by tea enthusiasts on the group. Another Assamese brand, Voyago Tea, has also ventured into this (a nine-year old aged pu’erh cake is on offer).
There’s Tea Studio from the Nilgiris, whose first batch of sheng pu’erh and white tea cakes came out last year. Their compressed white tea is particularly worth noting because if there’s one tea that ages beautifully, it’s white tea.
Making a tea cake is a tedious process, especially with a pu’erh, because it’s a tea that needs to be fermented in controlled settings and it takes time. Every step from the tea leaves and the base tea—known as maocha—has to be handled precisely. It’s a tea that calls for patience in the making and in its brewing and drinking.
A quick glossary if you are shopping for pu’erh. Gushu indicates that the tea is made with leaves from old trees; sheng is a style of processing where the tea is naturally aged over time; shou is when fermentation is accelerated to shorten the time needed for the tea’s flavours to develop. Maocha is the base material for pu’erh: fermented, but not yet compressed or aged. Some brands sell maocha on its own.
We still have a long way to go before we match the skill of Chinese tea makers, whose aged teas can sustain several infusions, revealing new layers of flavour each time. But that we have started, is a quiet shift, and a sign of a changing tea drinker.
1001 Teas is a fortnightly series about the many stories hidden in the world of tea. Aravinda Anantharaman (@AravindaAnanth1) is a tea drinker, writer and editor.