Whitepeak Silver Needle
The least-processed tea there is: nothing happens to this leaf except losing water.
Silver Needle (Bai Hao Yinzhen) is picked as a single unopened bud, still covered in the fine white down that gives white tea its name and its category. The processing is the simplest of any tea style: no rolling to bruise the cell walls, no kill-green heat step to arrest oxidation, no shaping. The bud is simply withered — spread thin and left to lose moisture slowly, sometimes for up to three days — and then dried at a low temperature.
Because nothing actively stops oxidation the way pan-firing or steaming does for green tea, a small amount happens anyway, passively, over that long wither — commonly cited at only 1–2%, the lowest of any tea type on the chart on this site.
Withered for up to 72 hours and low-temperature dried — no rolling, no kill-green step, no shaping at all.
