Mandala Year of the Dragon Ripe Pu'er -2012

This is a sample that Garret sent with a recent order. Thanks you SO MUCH, Garret!

I never drink as much Puer as I’d like to. I just don’t have time to do multiple short steepings all the time. My solution is to go with 7Grams steeped 3 minutes in my mug. When it comes to Shu, this almost always results in an amazing cup of tea. I resteep adding a minute, & again adding another minute, etc until the tea has nothing left to give.

So, that’s what I did. I’m on the 3rd steeping now & it is still rich & dark, sweet, & delicious!! The sample is generous enough that I’ll get to try it again using shorter steepings, & I promise I’ll give a much more detailed report then, but for now I can say that I’d like to pick up a cake of this, plus I’ve been eyeballing another yixing pot on the mandala site, & some other things, LOL. It’ll probably be another month before I can afford to buy anything (well…there is the Butiki order that I need to finalize tonight…but after that, I need to go back to the Hiatus Group, cuz I’ve been bad!).

Yes, it’s Oolong Owl Black tea week, but I need some shu pu’er while I do Operation: Clean House for Thanksgiving. Good time to crack open some pu’er samples too!

I found this pu’er to be similar to Yunnan Sourcing’s 2012 Dragon on Jing Mai (my review http://oolongowl.com/2012-dragon-jing-mai-puer-yunnan-sourcing-oolong-owl-tea-review/ ) as it has similar abrasive clay and campy notes in the first few steepings with a gorgeous deep orange red colour. They are also jing mai tea mats, which I didn’t know until sitting down to write this, hoot!

However, I much prefer Mandala’s Year of the Dragon as it is much more mellow, no fermentation weirdness and creamy notes in mid to later steepings. The creamy notes are fantastic and this tea just gets better and better each steeping. I’d say Mandala’s pu’er is more of a cuddly mother dragon one whereas the Yunnan Sourcing one is more of a scary bite first ask questions later dragon!

I just got my new glass mug from Mandala and I figured that I should pick a sample that I haven’t tried in a long time to break it in. I chose Year of the Dragon because…well, it’s the first one I saw.

I am going to try something a bit new. I am going to use the same brew time throughout. I’ve settled on 15 seconds.

1st Steep-
I may be a bit in love with this tea based on first impressions and I am deeply regretting not buying a cake. Very creamy and absolutely no earthiness. The only comparison I can think of is dates. Dried, dark yummy dates that I wait for at Christmas time and hoard them.

2nd Steep-
It’s getting to be more of a prune flavor. I don’t want to say that because most think of prunes as unappetizing but that’s what I’m getting with this steep—dried prunes. And it is yummy.

3rd Steep
Still tastes like a cross between dates and prunes…can’t decide which one. But it’s delicious.

4th Steep-
Still with the prunes but kind of candied because there is almost a burnt brown sugar aftertaste that you get with candied prunes.

5th Steep-
It’s starting to lighten a bit. Not much but enough that it doesn’t look so much like coffee. It’s lightened to the taste of raw figs. Oh boy.

I am now upping the steeping time to 20 seconds.

6th to 8th Steeps
Still figgy. A bit of candied fig taste with a brown sugar background.

I upped the time to 1 minute

9th to 12th Steeps
Still figgy but less so. Some vanilla notes peeking through at various levels of intensity.

13th Steep-5 minutes
Tastes like vanilla extract without the alcohol. Can’t say it’s not pleasant.

14th Steep-15 minutes
I think this tea is done. Tastes like hot water.

I love this tea. It hit every single flavor profile that I found appealing. Figs, prunes, dates…that’s like heaven to me. I’m a weird one I know. And as a bonus, I loved my new mug too. It’s adorable. It’s short and chubby and looks like it should be wearing a bow-tie. No, I am not crazy…I named it Stuart…maybe a little crazy.

P.S. This tea experience was completely different from my first time around with this tea. Just realizing that now when reading my tea note.

I received this a while back from Garret at Mandala with an order. This tea is the exact tea you should give a first time puerh drinker. This tea has the smoothness and creaminess noted in earlier tastings and a bit of a surprise to me. This tea is made with jingmai material that usually has a citrus twang to it. This is absent of any of that. I think if you wanted a good puerh to sit back in the chair and relax this is a good one. It has a good depth of flavor with no off or earthy taste to it. It has no drying of the tongue like some shou does and leaves a light cocoa vanilla taste. A well made tea in my book.

I received this as a sample with my last Mandala order. Thank you Garrett for including it for me.

I drank a couple of steep of it last night and thought it was a bit mild for my tastes. It was a nice Pu’er, but didn’t have enough flavor. The flavor that was there was nice and smooth, no rough edges, I just wish there was more of it. This is just a little too gentle for my tastes. Sooooo I took the leaves I was using and dumped the rest of the sample in with them added cold water and put it in the fridge to cold steep.
This is my first experience with cold steeped pu’er. OMG WOW!!! Why have I not been doing this sooner. This is AMAZING. I love it. You just get a touch of the classic pu’er flavor, but it’s refreshing and oh so good. I don’t think I would want to cold steep a big bold pu’er, but this was PERFECT. I may have to order some just to have it to cold steep.

Yours truly is immensely sleepy today, courtesy of the desire to get up early, basically resetting my sleep schedule because being nocturnal was getting tedious. Clearly I need more tea to wake myself up with, maybe keep myself awake with some painting, and then maybe a bit of reading or Minecraft. I have been busily stalking 4JStudio’s Twitter feed, they keep posting update teasers and I am super excited for new blocks to build with. The new biomes excite me too, but that means I will need a new world, or just wait til the Xbone gets to an affordable by me price and I can just expand my world. For now though, as soon as the update drops that means lots of building fun in my creative world.

This is a Shou after my heart, Mandala Tea’s Year of the Dragon 2012 Pu’er, specifically because dragons are near and dear to my heart, specifically my favorite dragon, Ben, even if he did spent the entirety of 2012 being insufferably smug since it was his year. Originally harvested in 2010 from 40-50 year old trees in Jing Mai, it was pressed in 2012, March 1st, 2012 to be exact. I felt myself lucky, because my sample of this Shou came with the Nei Fei, which I have kept stored away in a little box…for reasons. The aroma of the leaves is immensely earthy, it is rich and sweet with notes of pine loam, oak loam, a deep humid forest, and a tiny bit like prunes. At the very end of the sniff there is a gentle woodiness that reminds me of an old cedar trunk, with a slight crispness like the air before snow.

Into the elephant pot the tea went, after a rinse and the first steep the aroma is so earthy and woody. Like a mix of oak and pine wood that is both wet and dry, with sweet molasses and undertones of mineral and loam. Again this tea reminds me of a humid lush forest. The liquid is rich, woody notes of stems and loam with wet wood and a molasses sweet finish.

The first thing I notice from the first steep is how much it reminds me of a fallen tree, notes of earthy loam and wet wood combine with moss and mulch. It gently coats the mouth and goes from loamy to sweet figs, molasses, and a touch of prunes. The finish has a slightly bitter oak gall note, though the aftertaste is molasses and that lingers for a good long while.

Onward to the second steeping, the aroma of this one is still quite woody, but the woodiness mixed with a creamy sweetness gives the shou a bit of a vanilla quality. This mixes really well with the loam notes, sweet and earthy. The taste takes a note from the aroma and is quite sweet this time, it starts sweet, stays sweet, and finishes sweet. With notes of vanilla and molasses, figs and prunes, and a touch of honey, these notes mingle with pine loam and wet oak wood for a mellow and sweet sip.

The third steep had much in common with the second steep, as did the fourth. I did not notice much of a change until the fifth steep where the aroma and taste go almost entirely woody, with strong notes of wet pine wood, loam, and oak wood. It has a sharpness along with the molasses sweetness, this Shou is the right amount of woody and earthy in balance. I think I need to add this cake to my collection, because it turns out Ben likes it…which it would be weird if he didn’t, what with being a dragon and all!

For blog and photos: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2015/12/mandala-tea-year-of-dragon-2012-ripe.html

Dexter sent more of this my way – a good validation that i DO still want this on my wishlist to buy eventually. This is still creamy and deliciously smooth, with no earthiness to it. over the course of multiple steepings this changes to a fruitier sort of tea – jam/fig notes and then eventually there are some slight vanilla notes, but not too strong. This is a great puerh. Thanks Dexter!

After drinking water for most of the day, I made a cup of this, western-style. The first oddity was that I drank water for most of the day. The second oddity was that I made this western-style, steeping for four minutes instead.
It was pleasant, but not big on flavor. Perhaps I did not use enough leaf, or perhaps this would be better with a gong-fu brewing.

I really tried to like this tea since I enjoyed the others in the sampler pack so much, but this one didn’t do it for me. I found the flavor weak and the taste generic even after increasing steeping times. Eventually after just a couple of short gong fu steeps (like 4 or 5) the flavor was all gone, so…yeah not the best shou experience I’ve had.

This is a pretty mellow and easy-to-drink Puer. It’s really quite calming in that way.

The first tastes I got from the sip were of leather, earth, and dried fig. The wet leaves also smell of dried fig. The infusion color is a deep, dark brown as with most ripe Puer. There really isn’t much change from one infusion to the next, but it does seem to become even more mellow and with a bit of a dull sweetness to it. It’s a pretty agreeable Puer, despite not being a very complex-tasting one.

This puer may be a bit too much of a smooth-talker, giving me a bit of a cloying feeling. I think I need a little more to ponder on in my shu puer, a little more substance.