Bulang Shan Imperial Grade 2008 Shou/Ripe Puerh

I managed to get one of the last bricks before CLT sold out.

A year later I finally opened the wrapper and loosened enough for a session.

I love Bulang and this is no exception, it is rich, creamy and bitter sweet.

Wish I had ordered two bricks, ah well I will savor this one.

I don’t drink nearly enough pu’erh – especially considering how much of it I have in my cupboard. So I dug out my cute little yellow gaiwan – I love it – so tiny yet well shaped that you don’t really burn your fingers. It works really well for small samples and I only had a little of this one left.
I don’t have much to say – really dark, not much fermentation, a little chocolate, a lot of earthiness, some woodiness. I like it – it’s what I want in a nice shou.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc0yLobhqPT/?taken-by=dex3657

Deep and thick, the first few cups feel like drinking the results of boiling a delicious oak log, but it quickly yields to an almost sweet, rather fruity, cup after eight or nine infusions. Excellent for studying or trying to get things done!

I’ve had this brick for about a week it’s my daily drinker has a thick mouthfeel , dark brackish look to it but that gives way to a very pleasant cup buy the 3-6 steep. This is my third shou and fourth loose leaf or brick tea since giving up on tea bags . I highly recommend this tea, CLT is out as of 11/4 I should have stocked up.

Sipdown

I had decided to grandpa style this at work last night. I was in need of caffeine and decided that shou might’ve been the best choice. This is definitely a great tea to be had grandpa’d simply due to the thick, creamy, and very smooth body. Overall, the sample had lasted much longer than normal—as all samples that are good do.

PS. I’m trying to get everything from previous sessions together since I have a lot of catching up to do! I tend to record every session on my phone, as well as write notes. Now that I’m running out of space on my phone and the notes are piling up, I figured it is time to start putting them up on Steepster. :P

This was my first shou pu’erh and really my first pu’erh period. I have to say that as a (previously) heavy coffee drinker (shou changed my mind), this does it for me both in the morning when I need to enter consciousness, and throughout the day when I need a pick me up. I have brewed it in a 140 ml yixing and a porcelain gaiwan (60 and 150 ml), and wow, the yixing really rounds the edges of this shou nicely.

The early steepings are a deep brown/ black color which I thoroughly enjoy. There is a nice, smooth sweetness that isn’t too much complemented by a very slight touch of bitterness/ astringency as it rolls back on the tongue. The first steeping is nice, but the second is dynamite. Really rich and creamy.

Steeps 4-6 or so lighten up a bit and give way to a smooth, thick mouth feel. Any astringency seems to drop off allowing the sweet, almost honey-like sweetness to shine through. I love these steeps.

Steeps 7-10 or 12 are just delicious, period. The consistency is incredible. It’s like drinking diluted honey. The flavor is maintained nicely throughout, and I had a hard time “stopping” this tea from giving back. It is a pleasure to drink in the late steeps.

I prefer this from the Yixing over the gaiwan, but alas, my yixing is big enough that I can really only handle two steeps at a time! How could I solve this problem? Oh yeah, I ordered a 60ml Jian Shui from Crimson Lotus Tea!

This is my first of, Lord willing, many comments on great leaf! I’m excited to be apart of such a community!

Got this with the Crimson Lotus “What is Puerh? Three Tea Educational Tasting Set”. I haven’t had a lot of ripe puerh yet, but this is by far the best. Came on very earthy and dirt like, with the 2-3 infusions almost black. It then lightened up, mellowed out, and became sweet. A little fruit in there I couldn’t recognize. It reminded me of drinking coffee with Guatemalan Mayans around Lake Atitlan. I can see why this is popular!

Thanks to Crimson Lotus Tea for supplying this as a sample in a recent order. I enjoyed this last night. Didn’t pay super close attention to it as I was busy stoking a fire and engaging in conversation/reading a horror book out loud while drinking it. Did that sound pretentious? I guess it kind of did… But honest to goodness that was what my night consisted of. It was lovely.

Anyway, this tea was very smooth. It didn’t seem as dark as I imagined it would be. The first steep after two rinses was still pretty light. The sample chunk opened up on the second steep so the second and third were a bit darker in color and flavor. It lightened up a bit after that. The main thing I noticed about this tea overall was the creamy smoothness with no overt smells dominating. I enjoyed it quite a bit and could see it being a really good every day type of drink. Overall, I was able to get about 8 steeps out of this one.

I wanted to write about how I was surprised with a beautiful new teapot, gifted from the aether, or how Ben got me a book from one of my favorite authors (Randall Munroe, if you are curious) or how my sunlamp seems to be working and I am feeling better…but, all of these pieces of awesome news are dulled but sad news. The other day music and acting icon that helped shape my childhood David Bowie passed, and then today I woke up to Alan Rickman, whose acting I have been watching since I was tiny (I was raised on Die Hard!) having passed, these losses to the arts are sudden and tragic. They were not just icons of nerdity ( as Jareth and Snape) they were icons! They have left this life, but left us a lifetime of entertainment that has cemented their immortality.

I have had several teas from Crimson Lotus Tea, own a small army of tea frogs from them, and have had many excellent conversations with them, but I have not written about any of their teas and that is kinda terrible of me. So I am rectifying that today with 2008 Bulang Imperial Grade Shou Puerh! From my experience (limited as it is compared to the real Pu-heads) Shou from Bulang is usually quite sweet and rich, so let us delve into the tea notebook and see! The aroma of the leaves is indeed quite rich! Notes of loam and wet leather mix with burnt sugar, wet bark, cedar loam, and a distant touch of dates. It blends sweetness with earthiness in a rich dance that is pleasing to the nose.

Into my shou pot the leaves go for their rinse and short steep. The aroma of the wet leaves is super strong and intense, I lifted the lid off my pot and poof, face full of forest floor, with wet loam, a bit of peat, some wet pine loam, and a finish of leather. The liquid is sweet and rich, with notes of pine loam, mushroom soil, burnt sugar, molasses, and a finish of dates.

For the first few steeps, the real focus of this tea was its mellow loam and earthy notes. It has a subtle sweetness and a touch of mushroom soil, but as my notebook says, it is loamtastic. Blending pine loam and more deciduous leaves with gentle notes of distant molasses. It has a thickness which is nice but not overpowering.

Several steeps later and the aroma and taste really become intense, very strong earthy notes of loam and mushroom soil, wet wood, leather, and a deep heavy sweetness in the aroma. Sniffing this tea reminds me of sinking into a nice nap in a sun warmed forest. The taste is loamy and rich, but there is also a creamy sweetness like molasses candy and dates. It is thick and heavy, definitively a very rich shou!

Towards the end the aroma is still potent and loamy, notes of pine soil and molasses blend with oak wood and a touch of leather. This tea outlived me, I stopped at steep ten but I know it could have kept going for more steeps, please don’t think less of my stamina. The finishing steeps bring in more sweetness, molasses and brown sugar with dates and a resinous pine sap finish. It oddly reminds me a little bit of horehound candy on the finish with more of an earthy leaf loam and mushroom soil note. This was a wonderful shou, one I could see myself buying a brick of to slurp on cold nights.

For blog and photos: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2016/01/crimson-lotus-tea-2008-bulang-imperial.html

Wishlist tea from dexter holy we are being productive today. Tree down, house being dusted, vaccumed, floors washed etc while i work on release testing and copying all our CD’s over to digital. woot woot!

I’ve been sipping on this one for the better part of the afternoon – puerhs are great for busy house weekends i think because if you forget about what you’re drinking, just make another steep lol this is a really nice, smooth puerh. more to the woody side of things than earthy, sort of like hiking in the woods in vancouver ;) really enjoyed my time with this, and may have to put it on my wishlist, though i suppose it’ll likely sell out before i can get to it.

note: was able to do a significant number of steepings with my little sample from dexter – 10+ before it ran out of steam