Essence of Tea 80s VIVE & 70s SSHC Liubao

I’ve enjoyed quite a few of the Essence of Tea’s Liubao offerings. However, up until now, I’ve not had any of their top shelf offerings. These are my thoughts on two of those.

My first impression with this tea was that of Madeira wine. The tea had a distinct nutty, oxidised, and woody note with a slight caramel and brown sugar note, along with a grape impression. These are notes that can often be peeled apart individually in a glass of Madeira, particularly the oxidised note. The texture is soft, and the tea has a pleasant sweetness in the middle of the evolution, alongside a fragrant lingering aftertaste. It is also particularly warming, which is a good fit for the cold harsh weather here recently. Essence of Tea notes that this tea is particularly clean, and I would agree entirely, given there were no real wet or musty notes, but I did not find this aspect particularly noticeable until I reflected and compared. I am not particularly averse to musty, earthy or dirty notes.

My second session involved much harder steeping (longer, with added heat towards the end by pouring water over), which the tea took well, producing something much sweeter and thicker, and overall giving a more cohesive and full impression. However, it did lose the interesting resemblance to Madeira wine, due to the balance of those constituent notes and texture being thrown off.

This tea has a particularly stemmy picking, and so rewarded more aggressive brewing with a sweeter body. There is an interesting light vanillic and marshmallowy character on some steeps, but those are quite subtle. The texture is quite light and smooth, and the overall profile is clean. The highlight of this particular tea was a particularly intense effect on the body, as opposed to any flavour notes. Unlike the VIVE, it did not particularly warm my body. The best description of this effect would be “displacing” or “dissociative”. It was neither energising nor relaxing, oddly, and was not concentrated to a particular area of the body.

Unlike most other Liubao, I also quite enjoyed this one brewed in a larger vessel using the same amount of tea (roughly 5g/270ml). The texture was much improved, while retaining a similar degree of body effect and tasting slightly more intense, as well as improving the longevity due to the higher heat overall in my brewing.