Lancang Ancient Tea Company 2014 "Bang Wai Old Arbor (邦崴古树)" Raw Puerh

This is one of the few premium single-origin productions (along with Man Nong and Yiwu Zheng Shan) which Lancang produced for a brief period in 2013-2015.

An example of a big Chinese producer treating a single origin terroir tea right.  If you are already familiar with premium Western-facing or Taiwanese productions, we strongly recommend sampling to compare textbook Chinese factory processing of single-origin material.

 [For a side-by-side tasting of single-origin raw and ripe, processed by the same producer, we suggest ordering the "Bangwai Sheng-Shou Tasting" set from the menu.]

TERROIR

Bang Wai is one of the original six famous tea mountains, in the Puer/Simao prefecture. Tea trees here are a unique combination of wild species, ancient cultivated gardens and also hybrids, yielding a very powerful and distinctive floral-fruity flavor profile. Several years worth of spring harvested material from older trees was collected and eventually pressed in 2014.

TASTE PROFILE

This is strong tea, be gentle. First steeps hit with an intense salty umami and immediate mouth-watering (sheng jin) pungency. Completely smooth texture and lubricative soup with low astringency. Active mouth and throat feel (hou yun). Mid-session, a deep plum and yellow raisin sweetness emerges. Surprisingly the soup gets even thicker and more viscous with each later steep, making the late session very indulgent. The Qi is slow and gentle to start but hits pretty hard before you realize it, this is not a bedtime tea!