1980s Taiwan stored Liu Bao

Highlights:

• Mid-Late 80s
• Clean and well developed Taiwanese storage
• Thick, rich, dark taste
• Good calming Qi
• Very fine grade of leaf

This winter we tried a lot of 1980s Liu Baos in search of relatively affordable while still being high quality teas, this is the last of our finds.

Liu Bao baskets are very big (30-50kg+) and once the tea is taken out of the basket and a few years have passed, it’s very hard to tell what it was exactly. We were particularly interested in these small batches where the identification has been lost because it’s the only place where we can find a standout quality/price ratio, we only selected 4 batches among the 20+ we sampled. 20 might not seem like very much but it was from very knowledgeable and trustworthy sources exclusively, not randomly scouring in tea shops. Actually, about 15 of them were pretty good and still better value than a lot of 80s liu bao, but we just picked the 4 best anyway.

Genuine Liu Bao of this period from an identified basket will be over twice as expensive as this, while often not reaching the same level in quality. For identification of the period we relied on extensive comparison with Liu Baos from known-vintage and same fermentation level, so we’re very confident in the dating.

Most importantly though, although it’s a relatively small batch, we’re really satisfied with the quality of this tea.