Lao Banzhang ’05

Name: Lao Banzhang
Year: 2005
Weight: chunks (from a 1 kg cake/bing)

Details:
a one minute rinse brew is full of storage, very old cupboard made of real wood and taken care for decades, the pitcher is already emitting fruity notes, can’t resist to drink more of the rinse brew, a strong exotic wood taste, like eukalyptus notes, a real brew is indeed strong, using dismantled tea leaves and brewins shorter but very hot and with little water, like 70 ml with 4 grams of tea, genuine Lao Banzhang taste that is hard to put into words, it is strong bitter woody earthy and simply good, the bitterness is intermingled with smoky notes with a fruity sweet pinch at the end before swallowing it, the energy is omnipotent, with the charcoal burning I feel like in an old wooden house back in the days when this tea was made, I experienced it still in 2009 my first visit to Lao Banzhang, this tea is indeed an oldtimer, arms filling with vibrating energy and the head almost floating in the air, the third fourth brew liquor like quality with clean flavours showing gradually, I find the true aftertaste unique feel for recognizing LBZ, it’s like an essence of old tea tree puerh, an epitome of classical puerh, it is like this tea was even older, probably made the way I heard that several maochas of different age could have been blended, the scent of wet leaves is very deep and convincing of the age of this tea

This tea comes from 1 kg cake made by Liming tea factory, subbranch called Ba Jiao Ting, it is the logo with the eight square pagoda like tower. In the moment only a loose ‘dismantled’ chunks are available. The cake is pretty expensive still can be order on request. The cakes contains also pang xie jiao (螃蟹腳) so called crabs feet which is a perennial herb. They say it helps ‘to clean the blood and to get meridians opened’.