Bulang Shan Imperial Grade 2008 Shou/Ripe Puerh

Tea type
Pu'erh Tea
Ingredients
Pu Erh Tea
Flavors
Creamy, Floral, Oak, Wet Moss, Wet Wood, Cherry, Chocolate, Dirt, Wet Earth, Wood, Earth, Fruity, Sweet, Honey, Moss, Tobacco, Dark Wood, Smooth, Forest Floor, Dark Bittersweet, Thick, Wheat
Sold in
Not available
Caffeine
Medium
Certification
Not available
Edit tea info Last updated by Crimson Lotus Tea
Average preparation
Boiling 1 min, 30 sec 8 g 5 oz / 136 ml

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40 Tasting Notes View all

  • “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,...” Read full tasting note
  • “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...” Read full tasting note
  • “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....” Read full tasting note
    85
  • “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...” Read full tasting note
    84

From Crimson Lotus Tea

This dark puerh comes on strong quickly. It will brew thick and dark at the beginning but then mellow into a light sweetness. The leaves are all small buds and carry the name "Imperial Grade"

The Bulang mountain range is the famous home to some of the best puerh tea gardens in all of Yunnan. These leaves were harvested from trees 100 years old and blended by the Menghai Yunhe Tea Factory from different areas in Bulang at altitudes averaging 1600 meters.

This is one of the shou puerhs that really stood out to me during our 2014 sourcing trip. It’s everything I want in a shou puerh. It has a thick mouthfeel, with a hint of astringency, and sweet aftertaste. It’s truly delicious. I can and do drink this one every day.

These are generous leaves and can be brewed 15 times or more. Use 5-7 grams of leaves and brew with 8 ounces of water at or near boiling. Rinse twice for 3s each. Start with quick steeps under 10s. With each re-steep adjust the steep time to your taste.
http://crimsonlotustea.com/collections/shou-puerh/products/2008-bulang-imperial-grade-shou-ripe-puerh

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40 Tasting Notes

82 tasting notes

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.

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1040 tasting notes

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

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85
3 tasting notes

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!

Flavors: Floral, Oak, Wet Moss, Wet Wood

Preparation
200 °F / 93 °C 0 min, 30 sec 2 tsp 4 OZ / 120 ML

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84
1 tasting notes

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.

Preparation
205 °F / 96 °C 5 min, 0 sec 10 g 6 OZ / 177 ML

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90
400 tasting notes

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

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95
1 tasting notes

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!

Preparation
9 g 5 OZ / 140 ML

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85
11 tasting notes

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!

Flavors: Dirt, Earth, Fruity, Sweet

Preparation
205 °F / 96 °C 0 min, 15 sec 8 g 4 OZ / 120 ML
mrmopar

Glen has a good palate when sourcing shou.

Crimson Lotus Tea

One of the things that I love about puerh is how tied to memory it is for me. When I drink this tea I think of the North Georgia mountains in the summertime. It’s a happy place for me.

9 Thousand Things

It’s also my 6 year old daughter’s favorite – she’s been begging for me more! So, like a good dad, yesterday i did :)

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84
258 tasting notes

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.

Flavors: Creamy

Preparation
Boiling 0 min, 30 sec 8 g 8 OZ / 236 ML

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921 tasting notes

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

kristinalee

Glad you got the sun lamp!

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86
15350 tasting notes

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

Kristal

Awesome! I has many days off but unfortunately wasn’t productive in the way of cleaning- only productive knitting and reading wise, lol.

Sil

it’s technically a day off but i’m working all weekend from home. so goo excuse to get shit done…though i’d rather be reading :)

Crimson Lotus Tea

I’m glad you liked it! :-)

OMGsrsly

Wait. Dex AND I sent you this one?! I though Dex had a different CL Bulang… unless her Steepster cupboard wasn’t updated.

Sil

mmmm lemme go check this was a dex one for sure and nothing was a duplicate in my cupboard

Sil

i have no shou from you from CL…just sheng

OMGsrsly

The ball is Planet Jingmai. I thought I also sent you a silver baggie with this one though… I’ve never had the 2012 unless they were sampling it at the tea festival.

Sil

nope nothing in my puerh sample in silver from you. :)

OMGsrsly

I’m not imagining things. It’s in the current box for you. :P

Dexter

Dunno – I sent the one on her wishlist – I just ordered a couple of samples when I pot my yixing pot.
Was thinking about drinking Planet Jingmai next but it might have to wait for tomorrow. The little gold one from W2T is smaller and will be more appropriate for tonight.
Happy you liked this one…. :)

OMGsrsly

Planet Jingmai seems to last forever. The W2T one has been inexpertly hacked apart by moi.

Dexter

I’m not going to treat it with too much care – just going to toss it into a small pot and see what happens. I’m doing better with sheng lately with less leaf and hotter water – will see how that does with this one.

Sil

jingmai is on my list for tomorrow…since it’s not in a bag and i keep forgetting what it is lol

Evol Ving Ness

The productiveness of yours is very impressive. Very impressive.

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