2010 American Hao 1002 LBZ Pu-erh Tea Cake

I must say, this tea is one of the finest young puerhs I’ve had. It is truly impeccable. The wet leaves are a treat to my eyes. They are, in general, intact with beautiful little white hairs and hardy veins – usually an indication of arbor material. Pleasure to watch these leaves perform a wonderful Baroque dance to Bachs concerto #5. The consequence of such a beautiful performance by these little leaves is a brilliant golden soup – a soup that has various dimensions, thick yet silky smooth body and a slight bitterness that transforms into a heavenly sweetness. The Hui Gan is practically instantaneous with a half life of a good five minutes. In a nutshell, this is a tea with a lot going on. A fine tea.

Parameters : 4.5g to 100 mL in a Porcelain Gaiwan

Drinking this today on my personal day off from work. Haven’t really had a lot of time to drink tea and actually think about it…

A bit bitter/smoky at the start of the session, but that fades after a few steeps. I’m currently sipping through steep # 7 while writing this at the moment—I’m noting stonefruits/straw/leather-y apricots. I’ll have to admit that I wasn’t liking this one off the bat, but it’s growing on me…

I might have to start digging into this cake more often, now that I’m mostly working my way through my stash…I’m curious to see where the notes will go after a few months…

This tea came out of the LP Mystery Group Buy – Still behind on drinking through group buys…oops. I used the whole 5.8g in my 100mL gaiwan. The leaf smelled like straw, stonefruits, and a hint of brown sugar.

The flavor, especially early on in the session, was dominated by bitterness. There were notes of straw along with the bitterness, followed up by a sweeter flavor of apricot with a bit of sugary sweetness in there as well. Unfortunately, the bitterness and sweetness were never really balanced out. I enjoy bitterness, but I prefer it to be balanced by sweetness as well – this one wasn’t really. It got slightly less bitter as I steeped it out, but as the bitterness really started to drop off, the sweetness went with it. Not a particularly great tea to me, and I didn’t get much of any qi off of it.

This is a fairly tasty but bitter sheng puerh. It was quite bitter in thte early steeps. I would say it took at least four steeps to begin to lose its bitterness. It also developed that fairly typical sheng sweetness often described as apricots or stonefruits, but it took a while. This was not a tea that was noticeably sweet in the first few infusions. I would venture to say that this tea also developed a noticeable aftertaste, bittersweet in nature. As to the big question about this tea, is it real LBZ material for the price Puerhshop gets? I have been told that it cannot be but there is no proof that Puerhshop is lying about its origins. Alas, it is not possible to answer this question. The only real question I can answer is did I like this tea, overall, yes.

I steeped this tea ten times in a 140ml Ru Kiln Celadon teapot with 8.2g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse and let the leaves rest for ten minutes. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, and 1 min. I should also note that the leaves on this tea were still somewhat green and the color of the tea soup a dark yellow. It definitely needs to age a bit.