We don't know when or if this item will be available.
“Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve had a raw pu-erh. I meant to do a bunch of gongfu steeps and dump them all in a big travel mug (Fellow Carter Move, love travel mugs with the ceramic lining!), but...” Read full tasting note
(July 2022 tea club)
2016 Bulang – 100g – this tea has been in our possession for years, aging as maocha in Menghai. I realized after I wrote the paragraph below that it’s full of tainting, biased information—probably stop reading here and drink the tea first, take a few notes, then come back for my ravings. (READ NO FURTHER, GO DRINK TEA) It’s a simple little raw Puer tea from the Bulang mountains. What do I mean simple? Not overly intense, complex or mind blowing. That’s not to undersell it as a tea, but often times the marketing speak around read makes every tea somehow need to be an elaborate 18-layer wedding cake, when sometimes all you wanted was an apple. And to blather on further about this topic which nobody asked about (I get to do this, it’s my letter) if anybody says they’re sending you an (aged) 18-layer wedding cake for under $30 with shipping included, you’d better start to doubt them as a trustworthy cake source. So, all cards on the table, this is an apple of a tea. It’s nice, sweet, enjoyable, fragrant, and light. Nothing overly dramatic, but a lovely little snack in the middle of the afternoon. For some of you Bulang aficionados you might be thinking “I thought Bulang was all brute strength and bitterness!” I’m glad you thought that, because it allows me to rant further: Bulang is actually a huge mountain range with many, many villages and a very wide variety of teas, varietals and processing. We Puer folk often get trapped in reductivist thinking that pegs one giant region as one specific profile when there’s usually more nuance than that. While it is true that Bulang is known for those burly brawler style teas, there is also plenty of sweetness in those hills as well. If you’re looking for a more intense Bulang style tea, I’d recommend 2018 Ghosts (lovely underrated tea, going on 5 years old and I’ve barely nudged the price). Last note on this little cake, I may have done a disservice by writing everything above as it was all gear towards you raw Puer heads. If this is your first month and first Puer, this tea may in fact punch you directly in the face…welcome to the white2tea tea club!
Brewing instructions: Gongfu style, with roughly 6g per 100ml in your vessel and fast steeps. Use boiling water for the 2016 Bulang raw Puer, drop to 95C or 90C if you find it too intense.
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve had a raw pu-erh. I meant to do a bunch of gongfu steeps and dump them all in a big travel mug (Fellow Carter Move, love travel mugs with the ceramic lining!), but sniff and taste each steep before it went into the mug so it still felt like gongfu and I could see the differences between steeps and stuff. The big mug of tea was so I could have something hot and tasty to drink while working on a baby blanket for my on-the-way niece (? I only have a two-year-old’s word that it’s a girl). The steeping went according to plan and tea made it into the mug but then I fell asleep. I don’t know what it is about raw pu-erh that makes me sleepier than most other teas. The few sips from tasting each steep and drinking the last bit of a steep that wouldn’t quite fit in my mug knocked me out. It was pretty late at that point, but still. Luckily, the Fellow mug is more like a thermos than a regular travel mug and my tea was still hot and enjoyable today.
Dry leaf kinda just smelled like raw pu-erh to me. Like slightly spicy hay or something. I love that they double wrapped the cake even though it’s a tiny one. I think all tea cakes should be double wrapped or at least wrapped with the thicker type of paper. I’m always worried about destroying the wrapper way before the tea is gone when I get a huge cake wrapped in one layer of that thin tissue paper type paper. I also appreciated that this cake wasn’t super tightly pressed so I was able to gently pick out leaves with my nails instead of hunting down my tea pick. Did I measure my leaf? Probably should have, but no. I think I was on the lighter side leaf-wise but I’m a bit out of practice and this was my first time with this tea. Brewed tea has the sort of spice aroma and flavor that can be hit or miss with me. I can never pinpoint exactly what kind of spice(s), there’s just something that seems spice-like to me. Maybe a teeny bit of citrus. Bitterness comes out more as it cools. Empty cup smelled exactly like honey, which was kind of weird. Aftertaste is sort of lemon honey. This needs a proper gongfu session but I suspect this is one that will not play nice with my stomach with more leaf.
