2006 Guoyan Lao Ban Zhang

2006 Guoyan LBZ

Recently I purchased Wilson’s 2006 Guoyan LBZ, a tea I might have missed entirely but for a heads-up from another collector. This tea is stored in Malaysia under a brilliant strategy and network of tea friends and tea shops. When you already have too much tea, a good way to acquire more is by storing with your network. In this way, the wife will not know you have more tea until you bring it home with the quip “this is heading right back out the door.” Of course any tea that does not sell, well then…when enough packages are gone already, what’s another cake in the already full closet? Nobody will notice a thing.

I like very much the 2005 Autumn Guoyan I bought from Yunnan Sourcing last year at twice the price. This new beeng is an excellent deal for a 12 year old Malaysian stored anything, and only $10 shipping. (I have purchased old Liu Bao before just for the Malaysian storage.) The tea arrived with a nice aroma however I let it sit in storage a couple of weeks to relax. I decided on porcelain gaiwan to enjoy the storage notes fully.

Nice oily appearance

The tea indeed does not disappoint with the early obvious Malaysian storage, a woody, old-book type of flavor. The color of the tea is nice, but the soup shows some cloudiness which could be storage aggression or some other issue. I need to see if this clears up in later steeps.

On a hot boil the tea is not bitter, I can feel my mouth prepping for the bitterness, but as Wilson notes in the listing the youthful bitter edge is definitely off of the tea. As the tea cools, the bitterness is more marked, although not hair raising bitterness like the recent 03 Pink Dayi, nor hair balding bitterness like Wilson’s 08 Haiwan LBZ. Steeps 6-8 have a bit of a sour note, which suggests fermentation and this clears a bit more on steep 9. What is remarkable so far is the “sweet vapor” that comes up into the throat from the esophagus. 

First steeping, bit of cloudiness

Many teas give that returning sweetness on the throat or in the mouth, this tea is definitely more sweetness on a vapor cloud, a quality many people look for in an aged tea. The nice floral top notes are evident after steep 8 when all the storage is off and the tea clears, underneath is a more aggressive whiskey Menghai-ish flavor.

Third steep, deeper color, reddish aging early for 12-year old

The tea is not smoky and I did not see much for char in the strainer. I did see some powdery wet filaments which can contribute to clouding, for the tea has plentiful buds.

Leaves are plushy, decent thickness

I think we have a mix here of teas from regions around the Banzhang area. The tea is relaxing, but not much qi to speak of. Its real enjoyment is the full flavor profile ranging from floral to aged oak barrel booze. I can tell I have had a number of one-note teas lately when a full range profile sticks out at me. 

Steep 6

The soup gets thicker in later steeps, a light hand on the steep time will give a yellow brew, adding some 30 seconds gives a more reddish brown stronger tea which I prefer. Controlling the bitterness, if you need to with this tea, is all about short steep times as well as brewing on the boil and drinking as hot as possible.

Leaves are green with evident browning, having turned from youth

In comparing this 06 Guoyan with the 05 Autumn beeng, I think the 05 Autumn with the long leaves and pronounced qi may be the better experience, and the 06 is a bit more of a pedestrian factory blend of area teas. The 05 Autumn was also twice the price. When I think of where prices are going now, I feel as though the $92 price point for 357g is actually a bit on the low side given the 12 year storage, full flavor profile, the sweet vapor. Someone already owning excellent examples of LBZ teas may prefer to chase a more premium experience at this point in their collecting. But for a new collector stretching a budget, this tea is a good opportunity to grab a nice tea below that $100 mark, a point where aged teas overall are quite frankly rare.

Bud plus one leaf common

This tea is a bit rough on the gut if taken on an empty stomach because it is still very green, and I feel I can do something with the cloudiness via more storage. It needs 5-10 years, worth trying once to check the current state, but not one to drink regularly at this time. Wetter storage would surely work on that green, but at the risk of the floral notes I tasted in the middle of the session. I like where this tea is at because I can play with the storage on it, the good start is all I need.

Steep 9 with pretty leaves picked out

Cheers!

2005 Autumn Guoyan Lao Ban Zhang

Fall 2005 Mengyang Guoyan LBZ
from Yunnan Sourcing US

A month or so ago Yunnan Sourcing offered a sale on Aged Puerh, a store category of tea that does not go on sale very often. With the addition of free fast shipping for purchases over $75 on the US site, I checked there first for any teas that might interest me. I found the 2005 Mengyang Guoyan Autumn “Lao Ban Zhang,” a 357g beengcha for $190 (regular price) that is not currently available on the China site. Steepster reviews for this tea are quite mixed, and I wondered how many of these reviews are based on a sample of the tea rather than the full cake. Certainly any tea review is worth perusing to get as much information as possible before purchasing any tea, and especially one hovering at the $200 range. Yet another review elsewhere swayed my decision to purchase this tea far more.

A puerh tea lover is fortunate when information on a tea is available on the Half-Dipper’s blog. While I very much enjoy Hobbes’ photos, poems and creative prose, I find more valuable still the careful notes made on each tea. With the 2005 Guoyan cake on my mind, I remembered the initial post of his Montana trip many years ago with the Americana kitsch photos, but not the painstaking effort of updates on this single tea. When I see nearly ten years of notated updates, dear tea friends, I am so moved and touched by this. How many of us take the time to check our teas, re-brew them and then make notes over the years? If a person loves the old monographs of the Royal Geographical Society, think about what a revelation it would be to view the old field notes from the explorers before they wrote the final monograph. Yet this is what we have in the Half-Dipper.

I must thank Mr. Hobbes for his gift of detailed note-taking to the puerh tea community. No one else is as dedicated to tea over time as this writer. And it was his years of notes and subsequent re-purchases of the 2005 tea in question that settled my decision to jump on it for a sale price. I’m fairly certain the Half-Dipper paid far, far less for the tea starting back in 2008 than I paid recently. Mengyang Guoyan was something of a budget tea at the time. But with today’s prices, I think Yunnan Sourcing is selling very low.

One must take care when purchasing a tea labeled Mengyang Guoyan Cha Chang  勐養國艷茶廠 and I suggest heading over to Babelcarp and acquiring all the possible Mengyang Guoyan spellings before you search on the net or on Taobao. Fakes abound, and this tea uses the second possible spelling used by the company, the one I have just above. I got very different results trying all the spellings on Taobao. I ask that if you look for this tea, please compare the wrappers carefully.

The wrapper itself is important in distinguishing this tea from possible faking. According to Yunnan Sourcing, the tea was made for a private sale to a Kunming dealer and was never sold by the factory publicly. Apparently, a spring tea version existed at one time. For all I know perhaps some will crop up. But I noticed a few things about this production on the wrapper.

First off, the wrapper is thin with no date stamp. The back had many crimp folds and a twist on mine, but that is not necessarily unique. Some key things to look for on this thin wrapper include the Te Ji red stamp, which must be located on the left side of the design, not located on the bottom nor anywhere else. Next, the tea leaf in the design must point between two specific characters on the top of the wrapper. Finally, there is what appears to be a hand drawn stylized character in green ink. This character does vary between cakes, and mine has some heavy ink on parts of lines which makes me conclude this is hand drawn, so it indeed may vary somewhat. But the presence of varied and uneven ink on the lines of the drawn character will distinguish it from a computer printing. Here is my photo again, and I drew in where to look.

Teji red stamp on left is key on this private production.
Also note the direction of the leaf and the possibly
hand drawn character on the left. 

Now view this example from Taobao. I reproduced one image, it is a small image but I think you can see the variances.

Any Mengyang Guoyan cake should at the very least have the leaf angled correctly, though details in wrappers from other years may vary.

I compared my cake with the one in the Yunnan Sourcing photo, and with Hobbes’ tea and concluded that all three are similar with the key marks mentioned above, but with slight differences in placement of the red stamp and slight differences in the hand drawn green character. Yet the Taobao cake I found for about $72 did not share the proper characteristics and had a red stamp on the bottom of the design. Also, the Taobao cake looks much less oily, and the tea itself on top and bottom appears less consistent though this might be arguable. Of course one wants to think we have the genuine goods. With Yunnan Sourcing, I do not question this very often, but of course we all want to know if we can get a good price.

Long, oily leaves.

This is a beautiful tea with long leaves and intact stems, and arrived to me with a floral vegetal nose and also a smell of cold water metal tap. I allowed it to sit a couple of weeks just to take advantage of the warm humid temps of summer where my teas are stored. I removed some leaves by hand as the side and top portions of the cake are looser due to time. I didn’t measure the grams brewed here because some leaves are so long, I doubt I can get exactly the same gram weight every time without breaking leaves or hunting about for smaller ones. Not worth it to break up leaves simply to satisfy a tea scale. I also needed to use a larger gaiwan to stuff those stems in after they hydrated.

Long leaves easy to carefully pry off by hand.

I threw away three rinses because the tea took time to open, and the initial nose is a bit of medicine, wood and the aforementioned cold metallic water. The brew is brown for at least eight steeps, the color of drier storage. The leaves are oily looking, and the brew has decent thickness but not as much as Yiwu tea. Early steeps have some bitterness, but also a complex array of flavors. This tea is far more complex than most teas I have had for awhile, and the complexity got me to fall in love with it. I tasted early on in the session some deep spices, like mincemeat, in addition to a bit of medicine/incense, honey nectar, wood and floral flavors. The cup retained a lovely floral scent after each brew.

Two leaves and one bud tea.

This tea has big yun in the throat and a large presence in the stomach, while dancing around the mouth in a lively way. After four cups of about 100 ml or so I stopped for a bit to assess its effect. I got really tea stoned behind my eyeballs which turned foggy like I used to get with some types of weed. Also, the tea is rather astringent after about a half hour in the tea stoned state. My eyeballs and mouth dried out and I needed water. Then of course I started in with the tea drunk emails, and sent one to Scott Wilson saying “you under-price your teas, why do you do that?” Really, the man is insane.

He said, “Not sure you are referring to all my teas…”

I tipsily replied, “Yes I’m referring to all your teas.”

I have had at least five cakes recently that I thought were under-priced. Easily that means his other ten thousand teas are under-priced too. Or so I thought while under the influence, a time when statistical concepts like large representative samples and random sampling etc. mean shite. Truth is happily much more relative when tea drunk than at any other time. (I swear I am committed to conservative objective truth and go to bed with Hume every single night when not drinking.) Mr. Yunnan Sourcing said something along the lines that he tries to keep his prices as low as possible because he is aware his loyal buyers are the ones who keep his unique business afloat, etc. etc. Remarkable that the man continues to politely and rationally reply year after year to tea- inebriated people like me.

Early light steep.

After eight steeps I start getting a taste of nuts, real objective nuts and not just crazy nuts. More like walnuts or filberts. Nuts combined with wood and honey. The tea has a little bit of char which accounts for the medicine flavor in the first few steeps. Recently someone asked me what char looks like, so here is a photo of my strainer.

Check your strainer for char bits on any tea.
This one has a few black specks, not many.

Char should go away after a steep or two and one can get rid of it almost entirely by breaking up a tea into a jar. The char will mostly flake off during the process, and any remaining will fall to the bottom of the jar eventually. This will mostly prevent the flavor from affecting a young tea as it ages, but over time the worked in smoke will affect the tea. Many people do not find this unpleasant. I find it unpleasant when overdone, but that is not the case here.

The tea settles into a peppery floral honey after about eight steeps, and benefits from several hours rest every two steepings or so. Many aged teas are like this, they seem to fade but then with a few hours rest, or even overnight, they have quite a bit more to give. I’m still holding those 1960s leaves that are mostly steeped out from a session two years ago. Every six months I fire up the kettle and give those leaves a couple more steeps to squeak out a bit more tea brew. Even when faint, I can taste the flavor of the old tea. Then I dry them out again and let them rest for another six months. Not every day will I get an old tea like that to brew out. One reason some old teas may rest and give is because the leaves are very sturdy and get a bit leathery, more like tree bark. As a good puerh ages, the juices go and leave behind a concentrate and very firm material, so unless you want to boil out the leaves in a pan in one go, they can continue to leech flavor for some time.

Exceptional quality of the two leaf-one bud picking.

Astringency continues in subsequent steeps the following day as well, something that may or may not appeal to you. Of course I take drying meds and that may affect me even late in the day. I also got hot flashes, something I had much of five years ago and not so much recently. Either it is a woman’s thing or maybe a heart issue, or just related to hot tea in summer weather.

Of course the tea is still plenty olive green because of the dry storage and I am not sure that years ago I would have liked this tea as much as I do now. The slow storage has preserved the main qualities in the taste, so I can really appreciate what good dry storage does. The tea is much more comfortable than it probably was some years ago, and the deeper spicy autumn flavors are coming to the foreground without loss of the higher notes. 

Steep twelve. Still darker than the early steep above.

Tea stoned and sweating, my foggy tea stoned eyeballs still evident to me after ten steeps, although I must admit to steeping longer, more like thirty seconds. Some slight sour around steeps 9-11, that middle storage sour of a dry session which usually gives way to sweet syrup later. How long you want to go on this tea is probably up to you, at steep twelve I let it sit 45 seconds and was rewarded with a bitter and astringent brew rather than the sweeter brew of a short steeping.

Steep 13, not gonna toss this yet!

I paid $171 for this with the sale on at Yunnan Sourcing. I can see why the Half-Dipper bought several of these and carefully watches them. I’m sure the tea retailed for much less years ago, but I can think of other places where this tea might cost more like $225-300 at this point. But this Guoyan costs much less than even the price for YS 2006 Autumn LBZ and the 2009 Spring which have received much attention on tea chat forums. The days of finding any LBZ for under $200, or even large intact two-leaf/one bud teas of any region pre-2006 are at an end. This tea might be one of the last. 

The LBZ Word

Doubt is the stance I take when tasting puerh tea. Any puerh head who says they do not experience any doubt in their tea is fudging or in denial. The type of doubt I hear about most often from my friends is in their buying decisions, the kind of doubt that makes a person walk away from a tea, only to go back later and find the tea is sold out. Doubt like this fills tea chat between friends stewing over what to buy. This isn’t my type of doubt, though. To the contrary, I feel confident when buying tea simply because I care less about my money at this point in life. But when I taste the first cup of a purchase, doubt begins.

Although many of my reviews appear very confident, I go through steep after steep of doubt to reach an idea of how I feel about a tea and about myself as a buyer. At the very moment of first sipping I doubt my purchase and everything in my ability to choose a tea. Doubt is magnified by smelling the damp leaves when I detect anything that suggests over-heated chaqing, or a smoky medicine smell, and when I see bits of char in the gaiwan. I feel doubt when I find the sourness of dry storage. Or when I smell damp I imagine the beauty of those fresh leaves now killed off by too-wet storage. I feel doubt when I smell nothing at all, thinking I now own a dead tea. My mind races through ideas of what I can do correct flaws because I don’t want to give up on the tea yet. In reality, my steeping doubt means I now need the tea to win me over.

So, believe it when I say I doubt every single purchase I make, from the $400 tea cake all the way down to the idiot $9.99 brick with free shipping on EBay. I like to think this is intelligent doubt. For me, ignorant doubt is what I hear from people who say “that tea is too expensive/cheap to ever be worth the money” when in fact these naysayers have not tried the tea, and never plan on doing so. Doubt is a question and not a conclusion. While anyone can and should question a tea, doubt remains an open-ended thought.

With some teas, my doubt never really goes away. Especially when considering teas labeled with the LBZ Word, doubt is always the biggest factor. “Lao Ban Zhang” is just a village but also a tea term on par with “Jesus is Lord,” a phrase mostly embarrassing to hear or say out loud, much less publicly blog about.

For those of you new to puerh tea, Lao Ban Zhang is a tiny village in Yunnan, China with a hundred or so households, surrounded by ancient tea trees which for some unknown reason produce the finest puerh tea, known as the “King of Puerh.” This tea is prized for a balance of bitter to sweet, an incredibly long finish and heavenly body effects that place you on a plane of existence known only to aliens or angels. LBZ tea is the Ecstasy of Tea Drugs. Every year tourists pull into this tiny village by the hundreds, hoping to get a taste of this tea, only to discover that no amount of money will be enough to acquire any. Not only is this King of Teas impossible to get, Lao Ban Zhang is the most faked puerh tea on the market. Prices are insane for this tea, thousands of dollars a kilo. Farmers arrive from neighboring towns to this village to sell their ordinary tea to buyers who pass off the tea as real Lao Ban Zhang. Everyone wants to take advantage of the huge amounts of money flowing into the village.

The demand is high in part because 80% of the village farmers signed a contract with a single factory in the early 2000s, the Chen Sheng Tea Factory. Today this factory has a brand new building in Lao Ban Zhang which apparently required demolishing ancient tea trees make room. Not all the villagers signed the contract, but most did. So one tea factory has virtually an entire monopoly on all the tea picked there. The village possesses ordinary farmed tea gardens, hillsides of untended trees and a forest of ancient trees at least a hundred years old or more.

All this put together doesn’t yield very much tea. But because of the faking going on with LBZ, you can find teas everywhere trying to take advantage of suckers who don’t know any better. Because LBZ tea is such a tiny harvest, the Chen Sheng Factory must blend tea leaves from other villages into their tea cakes to make the good tea go a bit further. Even if a buyer is somewhat convinced that their LBZ tea cake is genuine, we don’t really know how much of a blend is in the tea, whether a brother or cousin might have brought tea over from a few villages away.

So owning a cake of Lao Ban Zhang tea is like saying you acquired a piece of the True Cross. A blogger who uses the LBZ word is immediately questioned, and so most tea bloggers use quotation marks and disclaimers when discussing LBZ tea. But some people do actually own “Lao Ban Zhang” tea, whether real, partly real or an outright fake. Doubt is highest with LBZ puerh tea, from the wrapper on down to the tenth steep and fiftieth session, unless the source is unshakable. Labels are notorious liars. All we can do is let tea speak and see if we enjoy it. I must say that the two 2008 “Lao Ban Zhang” cakes I purchased recently did convince me that they are decent teas, and the two are very different from one another.

I wrote about Wilson’s 2008 Haiwan LBZ on Steepster after I drank it. Wilson told me that when he opened his store, he wanted to put up some very good tea to both celebrate his store opening and show buyers that he has good tea to sell. He stated he bought a few tongs and kept one for himself, selling the rest to those of us lucky enough to grab a cake.  So I think his idea was to tease buyers into suspecting he has even better teas in his collection. His blog is certainly a tea-se with never enough detail and his store is the same, rarely un-wrapping a tea to show us the goods. He is a master of tea porn, always leaving us wanting more.

Wilson's 2009 Haiwan adventureineverycup.com
Hoarding blogger selling his stash

Wilson’s 2008 Haiwan is a ball buster of a tea, with bitterness that kicked me so hard my scalp lifted off the top of my head, pulling my hemorrhoids up into my throat. This tea is so bitter my tongue ran away and hid with nowhere else to go. I find white2tea’s Bulang-ish Amerykah series incredibly bitter, but this Haiwan cake went one further still, suggesting a blend of perhaps more Bulang or Laoman-e type leaves. The qi in this tea produced profuse sweating along my back. After eight cups of this madam I felt like I’d had sweaty sex all afternoon and needed a shower. I was so tea drunk that if a cop stopped me on the road I’d have blown out a breathalyzer. The 2008 Haiwan LBZ real or not has presence, and she is larger than life. I got twelve steeps in over two days before the hot, muggy weather forced me to toss the leaves.

Three friends of mine bought this tea from Wilson too. I immediately offered to buy them out, but of course no one is selling. Wilson’s Singapore storage has a nice slightly damp note, and we wondered how much more bitter this tea was just a few years ago because the liquor shows brown with a bit of red already. I’m not showing full photos here only because Wilson’s 2008 Haiwan is sold out. It is my most recent mental note going into the 2008 Lao Ban Zhang from Tao Tea Leaf. By now I’ve mainly forgotten the LBZ I shared with TwoDog last year which paled next to an incredible 1960s puerh tea we spent more time drinking. I remember TwoDog’s LBZ started out a nice tea drunk at our afternoon party, but really the 1960s puerh got me drinking the wash straight from the bamboo tray, something I don’t do every day.

2008 "Lao Ban Zhang" from TaoTeaLeaf.com

I didn’t mean to purchase this Tao Tea Leaf cake, but a friend directed me to the site to check out chaga mushrooms which this shop also sells, and my friend likes the shop’s Wuyi oolong teas. Tao Tea Leaf also had a weekend sale at the time, a 50% off “Boxing Day in July” sale. I decided to pass on the mushrooms and instead wandered over to the Puerh section of the store. The 2008 Lao Ban Zhang is the only beengcha tea the store has. The 357g beengcha normally sells for $190 Canadian dollars. But at the 50% off sale I got it for $95 Canadian, which after the favorable American dollar exchange left me with a final price of $85 US, including shipping. The tea has three enthusiastic reviews posted on the site, and these plus the low final sale price sold me.  

Owner Tao Wu is a young man who apparently grew up on a tea farm in the Fujian region before moving to Canada and opening a tea store at age 28, calling himself a “tea master,” although he also got a tea sommelier certificate in Canada to cover the bases, I suppose. He claims to have ordered his 2008 LBZ by private, special order in 2007. He doesn’t say where he ordered it from, and doesn’t show the wrapper in the listing for the tea. His description discusses Lao Ban Zhang village and also mentions the nearby Xin Ban Zhang. I read this over several times wondering if this is a hint that perhaps some of the tea is from the latter nearby village. The wrapper of course says Lao Ban Zhang on it, but very often private orders end up getting a wrapper that really isn’t from the factory making the tea. The wrapper might be extras “on hand,” because special wrappers sometimes aren’t made for small private orders. Because the listing does not show off the wrapper, maybe it doesn’t mean much. I won’t get over the doubt of the wrapper even if somebody tells me it’s all legit.

The tea arrived during a hot, humid spell of weather and surprisingly had no smell. I started to worry that the tea is dried out and about “Toronto dry storage.” Tao Wu doesn’t discuss his Toronto dry storage in specifics. I opened up the cake and let it sit in the humid weather for a few days and it still didn’t develop much of a discernible smell, leaving me to ponder whether I have a dead tea on my hands. I also know that some real Lao Ban Zhang teas don’t have a strong floral smell.

Finally I decided to try the tea when the weather cooled off. First two rinses yield a slight Chinese incense/medicine odor and I sigh, here we go, not my favorite profile and gotta mean some burnt tea in here. Upon rinsing the leaf I see that this is small leaf tea for the most part. Buds are evident in the mix, with a few medium sized leaves but mostly they are fairly small. The description says that the tea isn’t charred, but during the rinses I find char in the gaiwan to match my charred medicine perception on the leaf odor. Not much char, but it’s there. Two cups go down in short order. The first cup is slightly medicinal, a bit of fermented hay, and the second a bit less so.

The beenghole photograph. Reader demands...
Actually you can learn a lot picking a beenghole.
Sometimes the leaves on the underside are lesser quality.

Like most compressed teas, the first two cups are on the thin side, but a bit active in the mouth, so not a dead tea as I feared. I get a slight bitterness, some sour dry storage on the early two cups, a bit of honey and a touch of floral but maybe I’m imagining it. I wonder if the tea is a bust so I hunker down with my computer to read about the tea again and look up some newspaper articles and reviews on the tea shop.

Second steep. Brownish-yellow dry storage.

After fifteen minutes of reading I sit straight up. My lower back breaks out into a sweat and qi flew up my spine into my ears. Holy cow this is creeper qi. I’m reading, forgetting my cup and this qi takes me by complete surprise. Although the tea is not terribly bitter, nowhere near the 2008 Haiwan and not even bitter compared to most new teas, sure enough here is returning sweetness too.

My throat seems a bit full like a ball of draining sinuses. The tea sits in my belly for an hour or more. I get hiccups. My mouth dries out like sailor’s jock strap. Just to be certain my throat is feeling the tea and not sinus drainage, I pop an allergy tablet. We’ve had so much rain and the ragweed is in full bloom. I return to my computer and consume dozens and dozens of pages on LBZ to see if anyone else has a 2008, or had one to sell, or reviewed one. I can’t find anything.

Three hours later, after cat box cleaning and other household chores, I pick up my cup and sniff it. The floral and honey, powdery smell is incredible, so much so that I immediately doubt whether I washed the cup before starting. I rinse it out with boiling water before continuing with more tea, and I make certain the cup has no odor this time.

Two more cups. I don’t notice a Chinese medicine smell or taste anymore. The fourth cup is much more bitter than any of the previous because the tea is opening now. The soup is a bit thicker. This time the qi doesn’t hit until about a half hour later, but before this I cannot doubt the full huigan of this tea, because my mouth sweetens up. Nor can I deny that this tea sits in the belly like hot pepper jelly beans. The astringency hits even harder an hour after drinking, but of course I need to blame my allergy tablet too. Finally, I must admit that my empty cup smells like a garden of honeyed orchids, even when dried out to the point of only a drop or two left on the bottom. I marvel at how this fragrance is more alive in my dried cup, and not really on the tongue when drinking. I’m glad I chose a tall cup which holds fragrance better than small wide cups.

The fourth cup has spicy hints as well as bit of wood but not the strongest flavored cup overall that I’ve ever had. I feel like there are layers here I can’t describe, complexities I perceive more than taste. Honestly I don’t smell much in the gaiwan after pouring water on the fifth steeping except a hint of the medicine, a bit of green wood. Still some bitterness, a feeling in my esophagus of swallowing overly large radishes, a heat that isn’t like chilis, and this suddenly changes to sweetness within about 5-10 minutes. I can easily do 1-2 cups of this tea and then just sit back with what I drank for a couple of hours, observing the effects. All this I’m typing at 2 a.m., and then I realize I left my big cat outside. I let him in and feed him, and on this cool night just moving to the door my body breaks into a sweat with waves of qi along my back and ears.

Steep 8

The next morning I steep out the tea. I over-steep a bit on number seven whilst going after my kitten when he starts walking on dirty dishes. I get even more bitterness than steep four. I want to over-steep this tea to push for flavor and that’s the wrong way to go, this tea isn’t about the full flavor as it is about subtlety. Over steeping just gets me a bitter cup which kills the chance of tasting anything deeply. I miss the oak cask and vanilla but get more of the radish stuck in my throat, and hiccup-type burps.

Day three: twelve steeps in and not done yet. This blog post has meandered on to god-only-knows-what, that nebulous zone of tea heaven where teas never quit. On steep thirteen I’m going long on steep time, so am gonna quit now. Wait, I’m still feeling this tea in my throat even though the flavor is very light now and the fragrance is about gone. I’m sure I can squeeze out a couple more steepings, the stems are rather large, so fifteen is a good estimate for this one considering I over-steeped at least two. I’ll conclude this tea is part old arbor and part plantation/garden, and darn nice for my $85.

Char evident on leaf tips at the top of the photo.
Not much to worry about here, but present. 

I doubt the wrapper, I doubt the origins, I doubt the vendor, I doubt the price, I doubt the storage and the processing, but the damn tea won’t let me go past itself to the conclusion of anything other than this is one interesting session. Or maybe my body is having an interesting session and I really drank nothing at all. In comparing the two LBZ teas, I hate to use the sex metaphor, but Wilson’s Haiwan LBZ is like sweaty slamming against the desk in a hot office, and this TaoTeaLeaf is a bubble bath with spiced yellow mead and white towels.

Everything about this tea makes me doubt, except the tea itself. If you are interested in trying this 2008 tea, TaoTeaLeaf offers a number of sample sizes to choose from. The whole cake is on the pricey side. But you can plan ahead because the shop has two 50% off sales per year, one on Boxing Day (December 26) and the other Boxing-Day-in-July. The $190 Canadian dollar price converts in the shopping cart after you enter your address information.

You can say whatever you want. The vendor can write me pages and pages justifying this tea and tea heads can write comment after comment denouncing it. Any LBZ tea is a guilty, idiot purchase or an act of faith, take your pick. But I’ll stand by Wilson’s Haiwan and Mr. Tao’s LBZ as unique teas. I write about “Lao Ban Zhang” teas so you don’t have to. You can quietly purchase whatever LBZ you want, rewrap in plain paper and hide it in your dildo drawer. Nobody needs to know.

2004 Lao Ban Zhang Bamboo puerh-sk

A bit warm for aged puerh these days.

In spring I picked up a sample of this tea from puerh-sk after purchasing a teapot. I have no business visiting puerh-sk except that my friends on Instagram egg me on with photos of Novak and Bero teaware and eventually I am worn down enough to buy something. I have already written about the decent Sejak I also bought at the same time, a nice find. And as I recently tasted a fine leaf quality LBZ during a session with TwoDog, I think now is a good time to compare my earlier purchase of tea from the same region. Currently you can get a 25g sample of this for 9.2€, or 3.10 if you only want a single session, but I like to get at least a couple sessions from samples.

This tea is a local craft bamboo stuffed tea, so as with other bamboo stored teas the leaves are highly compressed. Dry storage on this one, and the tea arrived with a nice sweet-dry fragrance exhibiting the appropriate humidity levels. I don't smell any bamboo storage odors or anything dusty, so puerh-sk's storage is very attentive. Not too often I get an aged tea that doesn't need airing. Selected 6 grams for brewing, mostly the loose tea to save the bigger chunks for later.

Tea steep >5 with the storage poured off.

Initial impressions: tea is very smoky, in fact I'd think this is a Xiaguan if I didn't know better because the taste is very similar. Flavor-wise, most of this pours off after two rinses and a couple steeps, still can smell it in the tea leaf. I tasted the first cup and dumped the rest on my tea pets to keep moving on the steeps. Two cups later and I had a very similar stoned feeling to my eyes and forehead that I got with the LBZ from TwoDog, but here I also get the sweats.

This tea has lots of warmth in the throat and stomach. I get the same warmth from older made-for-Tibet teas, and older Xiaguan before 2006. It's more than just aging, I think tea leaves are just different now. Flavor-wise, however, I'm not noticing much huigan. The bitterness in the tea itself is changing over, but right now the stage of fermentation combined with the smokiness is just at a sour point. It is in-between the bitter young years and sweeter aged years. Which means this is a good tea for me to work on with my crocks, I can rely on the body effects being there because the tea is not flat and dead, all I have to do is work out the smoke which takes a year or so and then wait for the leaves to continue to ferment. Perhaps this tea will be nice and sweet, well on its way now. I will revisit this sample in a year to see if I've worked out the smoke. The leaves show promise with a few thicker stems, and small, but plushy leaves.

I can't say this is a great tea right now nor recommend everyone run and pick some up. Or that it will ever be a great tea. Or that it is worth the premium price tag to just to have Lao Ban Zhang in the name. Still, if you're visiting puerh-sk on a teaware hoarding mission and want to add something to your cart, a sample of this might fit the bill.