Moose Crown 2004 Meng Ku Private Stock Ripe Puer

Backlog

I figured that I should catch up on these notes while I’m up early (by means not on my own freewill).

I hardly noted anything with this session, other than the flavor profile. I was drinking this at work in my Kamjove and working, so my mind wasn’t fully on the tea at hand.

Notes: Nice fully earthy body, with a reminder of a rainy Spring day. A lot of “earth” aromas and flavors.

89/100

Gongfu!

I was looking through my tea stash this afternoon for a pu’erh to continue my “Oops, All Shou” challenge from the week, and this one stopped me in my tracks. It’s honestly sooo hard to believe this tea is nearly twenty years old! Like, wow, 2004 was two decades ago. This tea could potentially be older than my youngest sibling who was born in the same year. Wild. So wild.

It’s so delicious though! I don’t have a lot of the sample left, so I’m brewing stacked infusions with one of my smaller gaiwans just to try and get the most out of it. So velvety smooth, with a deep earthy and camphorous quality that hits you in the back of the chest. It has notes of molasses/brown sugar, oat milk and malted grains, decaying wood, and clove. This is from way, way back in BLT’s first year as a company. From those who maybe don’t remember, at that time every tea was named after an animal. All the animal names generally matched some quality of the tea pretty perfectly, but this one is truly deserving of its namesake crown. I can picture exactly the forest this majestic, ominous Moose would rule over when I drink this ripe pu’erh. It’s spot on…

Tea Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CxOjP9tOHTY/?img_index=1

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVEEwxm6ULI

Got this as one of many samples in my BLT order and drank it towards the end of last week, but didn’t have Steepster up to note at the time.

Steeped this according to their recommendations to get a deep-colored brew with a dark, sweet, earthy aroma. I got sweetness and a nice, thick mouthfeel right from the start, and the sweetness really started to come out in the second steep and carries on throughout the session. I’ll need to give this one more dedicated attention in another session, but I found it to be an easy to drink and enjoyable tea.

Thank the sound fidelity gods for noise canceling headphones! My mom got me a set of fancy Turtle Beach gaming headset for an early birthday present after my usual Xbox headset died, turns out I need an adapter to use them for gaming (oops) but at the moment they make excellent headphones! I am using them to blast Abney Park into my ears to block out the incredibly heinous sound of lawn mowing and leaf blowing outside my window. I swear when I do get around to owning a house there will be no grass, just moss, gravel paths, and garden patches. I truly hate grass.

Today’s tea is seasonally appropriate as the cooler weather (slowly) approaches, Moose Crown 2004 Meng Ku Private Stock Ripe Puer by Bitterleaf Teas! This Shou comes from the same year I escaped High School, so you know it will be good, made from Meng Ku big leaf material and pressed in Meng Hai Facilities. It also has the distinction of being the most expensive Shou on the BLT website at a whopping $0.48 a gram with the total 250g brick being $119.50. Most the hardcore Pu heads won’t balk at that price and will buy a tong to hoard…but I am not a Pu Head, partially because I am a bit on the poor side and that price makes me die inside a bit because I really liked this one! It was love at first sniff, with notes of sweet dates, sweet rice, peat, distant camphor, wet loam, and a touch of wet leather. It is very sweet and earthy without a hint of dirt, it is one of the cleanest smelling Shous I have sniffed with only a hint of leather, which I like. A lot of Shous I have run into have stronger either dry or wet leather and I prefer my leather well used, wet, and light if it is going to be present at all.

My beloved Djinn pot (as I call this peculiar shaped yixing) had the honor of steeping this one up for me, the aroma after a rinse and first steep is flooring, there is just so much going on! Notes of camphor, dates, peat, loam, pine sap, wet pine wood, rice water (as in the exact smell of the starchy rinse water from making sushi rice) molasses, and brown sugar. Oomph, it is like being inundated with sweetness while nesting in a hollowed out log on a summer day in a mountain forest. The liquid of the first steep is surprisingly intense with sweet and starchy notes of rice and molasses, dates and baking cocoa, an earthy finish of peat, loam, pine wood, and molasses. I correctly suspected that this was going to be a crazy session that would stick in my memory for quite a while.

This tea starts dark, even for a first steep Shou, and then by steep two it is an inky void. it is like drinking a thick pile of hot night sky, it is intense! Ok, I am going to be honest, what the color really reminds me of is Nuln Oil that has dried out a bit so is super thick, Nuln Oil is a Shade/Wash type paint I use for painting miniatures and it is one of my favorite things, I call it liquid talent. Enough about color and thickness though, the taste, oh my stars and garters that taste. It is like molasses and dark chocolate, dates and pine wood, and a touch of mineral at the first steep. The second and third steep bring in an intense pine loam taking over for the mineral, with a building camphor that manages to make the tea both warming and cooling at the same time. It was so nice to drink a shou and not get the sweats and hot flashes, because I am weird.

Somehow, by steep four, it manages to be even thicker, I almost feel like I am drinking warm honey with that thickness. The sweetness in both aroma and taste increase as well, stronger date and molasses notes with a creeping rice starchiness that reminds me a bit of mochi. Towards the end of each sip a building dark chocolate (like the really dark stuff) and pine loam creep in with a finish of camphor and lingering wet leather note that only really shows up in the aftertaste. I love how this tea really doesn’t mess with my internal temperature too much.

I didn’t really notice much of a taste change until steep ten, where the earthy notes start to fade and is mostly sweetness and now a touch of malt and woodiness. It lasted a total of fifteen steeps, finishing with distant molasses sweetness and rice starch with a date aftertaste that lingered long after I had finished. Not only did this tea taste good it felt good, it was gently warming similar to a Yancha more than a heat power station that some Shous can be, meaning I could drink this one when it was warm out and not wait til the cold weather. I also find that Shous are either very relaxing putting me into a nice stupor or incredibly energizing, usually the hotter the Qi the more energized I feel. Since this was not overly warming it was more like taking a hot bath before sleep or snuggling under a fuzzy blanket…yeah this is definitely the fuzzy blanket of tea. If it wasn’t for that massive price tag I would buy a tong and make this beast my daily before bed drinker!

For blog and photos: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2016/11/bitterleaf-teas-moose-crown-2004-meng.html

Bought a sample of this with my recent order. I did like this tea. It was bittersweet at the start with notes I would describe as bittersweet chocolate without the added sugar. The bitterness steeped out after about six steeps. There was some fermentation flavor to this tea but not a lot. It steeped out after a couple of steeps. Overall I liked this tea. However at the price they charge I’m not sure I would buy it.

I steeped this tea fourteen times in a 150ml gaiwan with 10.2g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min, 1.5 min, 2 min, 2.5 min, and 3 min. The tea was not completely played out at fourteen steeps. I’m sure I could have gotten a few more steeps out of the leaves. This did seem like a high quality tea, I’m just not sure it’s worth the price of around $125. I did enjoy it quite a lot.

second session with this tea. i like it a great deal. very smooth and creamy-thick mouthfeel, even with 1g:20ml (as recommended, but usually i tend more toward 1:10 for shou), with a clean set of flavours underneath. it’s so lovely and cozy. nice sweet aftertaste, which i love. solidly slicks down your teeth, as well.