One of my swaps from the Steepster meet, this is a Lao Ban Zhang, aka the king of teas, aka the expensive stuff. Number 16117-1 from Chadao.de
First off – amazing colour & fuzz on the leaf! That’s some seriously show-offy silver hair.
The session starts with a glorious sweet perfume right off the bat. It’s one of those tastes that manages to be indefinable, yet so obvious when experiencing. Soft pineapple sweets are there too, such a nice flavour!
Chaqi is strong, but not so much that it’s uncomfortable, I feel relaxed, & over the course of the day I expected bitterness or sour to creep in but had been informed by Rui that this one goes twenty steeps, and so I took it there, and it followed perfectly. I didn’t detect the bitter notes of young plantation trees, so if they were there they were skillfully blended in as not to affect the taste. It also wasn’t face melting aggressiveness like people seem to expect from Ban Zhang, but instead elegant.
Seriously good tea. Throughout twenty steeps it stayed harmonious & balanced, and only when I got near the magic number did it just fade off quietly into a perfume water. I also noted the body still being good well into the teens.
https://looseleaf.blog/2017/10/25/2017-lao-ban-zhang-chadao/
Flavors: Perfume, Pineapple
Great tea! ChaDao offers some very nice teas, especially puerhs made by Chuan Pu and some good aged ones (the oldest one are already sold out of course ;)