Two Paths Into the Same Aged Tea
This Liubao shares almost everything with the 1998 batch in this same series — the same Wuzhou origin, the same higher-grade Guiqing landrace old-tree spring leaf, made within a couple of years of each other and stored the same way since, pressed into its original bamboo basket. The one thing that's different is the fermentation method.
Where the 1998 batch was double-steamed and double-pressed, this one went through 冷水渥堆 — cold-water pile fermentation, a slower microbial process rather than a heat-driven one. Both are traditional methods within Liubao production; neither is more "correct" than the other, they just arrive at aged tea by different roads.
Brewed side by side, the family resemblance is obvious — the same woody-to-aged-to-ginseng progression in the cup — but the texture and the pace of that progression shift depending on which road was taken. The recommended way in here is the slow one: a sealed flask, boiling water, a full hour of steeping, rather than the quicker gongfu approach. Some teas want to be rushed. This one, made by a slow method, asks to be drunk the same way.