Should the Pu-erh Tea Cake be Sun Dried or Baking Dried

As is well known, the pu-erh tea is featured by Sun-dried during the processing of maocha.

Now the question is, should the Pu-erh Tea Cake after compression be subject to sun-dried or baking dried?

Let’s review the the handling of Pu-erh Tea compression. The loose tea leaves will be softened by hot steam in the first step. to make it able to be compression. In this processing, the tea leaves absorbs a lot of humidity, thus the moisture content after comepression is very high. To make the tea cake be dried by Sun, it can be dried. But the drying duration is long, and not even. Because now the tea is in cake form, the surface and the inside part of the tea cake behaves quite differet when subject to Sun drying, the inner part takes long time to dry. It is just like that after the tea is rolled, and the tea sent for drying without dismissing pile group. In this way, the freshness of the tea will be greatly reduced. And the taste might turn sour. Because high moisture is long kept inside the tea cake.

So we can conclude that the drying of tea cake needs to be baking dry, which is faster and can ensure the freshness and proper taste of the tea.