Specialty shops
White tea rewards a shop more than most categories, because the difference between fresh and aged is hard to read on a screen.
In a shop you can see the down on the buds, which is the main grade marker for Silver Needle, and no photograph shows it well.
You can also smell a cake, and a sour or musty note is the one thing that should stop a purchase immediately.
Ask whether they have a cake open that you can look inside. Any shop selling aged white should have one.
The margin over online is real but smaller than people expect for aged cakes, because shops buy those in bulk.
Expect to pay more for 50 grams of fresh White Peony than online, and to get a fresher tea for it.
Look at how the cakes are kept. Open on a shelf under a light is wrong, and stacked in paper is right.
Use the shop to learn what a good Fuding White Peony tastes like. That reference makes every later online purchase work.
The best shops let you taste an aged white against a fresh one, which is the most useful hour you can spend on this tea.
Fifty grams at 3 grams a cup is roughly 16 cups, which is two to three weeks of daily drinking.
Online
Online is where almost all aged white is sold, and it is where age claims are least verifiable.
For fresh white, buying online is straightforward. The tea is cheap, the risk is low, and samples are widely available.
For aged white, insist on a pressing year and a storage history, and treat any listing without both as a young cake.
Pressed white only became common around 2010, so an age claim much older than that is false on its face.
Photographs of the cake surface tell you little. Photographs of a broken edge tell you a great deal.
Read the description for specifics rather than adjectives. A year, a county and a grade beat any amount of praise.
Buy from sellers who specialise in white tea rather than general tea shops with a white tea section.
Postage on a cake is significant, so order two or three at once rather than one at a time.
Keep the wrapper. It is the only record of what you bought, and without it the cake has no history.
Markets and direct
Tea markets are the traditional route for white tea in China, and they still work if you know what you are doing.
The advantage is price, and the ability to inspect a whole cake before paying, which online never gives you.
The risk is the year. Age claims at markets are the least reliable of any channel and there is no way to check them.
Fuding origin is claimed almost universally and is true perhaps half the time, which is the scale of the problem.
Buy from a stall that sells mostly white tea rather than everything, and that has been there for years.
Buying direct from a producer in Fujian is possible through group orders, and it is the cheapest route to good fresh white.
It depends entirely on one person in the group knowing the producer, and it falls apart when that person leaves.
Take a cake you already know with you to compare, or buy the same tea from two stalls and drink them side by side.
For aged white specifically, do not buy at a market at all. It is too easy to fake and too hard to verify.
The practical mix
Buy fresh white from a shop or online, and buy aged white only from a specialist you have dealt with before.
Use samples for the first year. Fifty grams from three sellers teaches more than a year of reading.
Once you have found a seller whose fresh white you like, buy 100 grams at a time and stop comparing.
Keep the aged purchases to one or two a year from the same source, so the storage history stays consistent.
A shop for learning, online for restocking, and a market only when you can take someone who knows the category.
Keep a written record of the pressing year and the price for every cake. Two years of that record beats any guide.
Do not spread aged buying across many sellers, because you lose the one thing that matters, which is comparable storage.
If a channel cannot tell you the picking year, it is the wrong channel for white tea, whatever else it offers.
The test in every case is whether you can find out the year, and where the tea has been since.
A cake pressed in 2019 is six years old now, which is still young for white tea and worth knowing when you buy.