Mandala Tea

A most satisfying oolong from Mandala. After two short hot water rinses this tea blossoms into a full frontal cup of sweet, earthy, fruity and smooth oolong…

A mouthful of flowers and veggies

This is a tasty tea. It is slightly malty. I am getting another note that I think is frequently described as baked bread. This is not as good as the one from Mandala I was drinking yesterday, I think that one was Black Gold.

I steeped this ono time in an 18oz teapot with 2 tsp leaf and boiling water for 1 min.

This tea was good but very heavily fermented. It was slightly bitter in the early steeps. Drank this last night and am just getting around to this now. It got fairly tasty by the sixth steep but I was so tired from lack of sleep I didn’t get the nuances. I will have to drink this one again in a small gaiwan so I can resteep it 12 or 15 times and see how it really is. It is fairly rare to find a ripe tea from Yiwu.

I steeped this six times in a 207ml Taiwan Clay Teapot with 10.2g leaf and boiling water. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, and 30 sec.

The older I get, the less I enjoy sugar. It’s even gotten to the point these days where I barely like chocolate. Any kind of sugar just leaves this sour, chemical taste in my mouth. Does anyone else experience this?

Black Beauty is like how I remember chocolate tasting. Wonderful and dark, without any off flavors. I tasted this tea in my mouth for almost an hour afterwards – and the whole time, it felt like eating chocolate.

Getting a lot of chocolate and a roasted flavors from this tea. A mild malty sweetness afterwards. A definite structure of tannin and strong black tea underneath holding it all together.
I can see myself happily sipping this on a workday afternoon while the rest of my coworkers reach for their chocolate stashes.

Stuck at work this afternoon – ok if I spent more time working and less time watching Steepster my day would have been shorter. Oh well – if I have to be here, might as well make the best of it. With that thought in mind I pulled another Mandala tea off the shelf to drink at work.
This is a really nice tippy black. It’s a solid everyday tea. I would be perfectly happy drinking this most days at work. Bold and breakfasty enough to drink in the morning – not so bold that it’s too much for the afternoon. Can handle all the strange and nasty things I do to tea while at work. Is this a special occasion/best of the best black? No it’s not – but one can’t have those teas everyday (or at least I can’t). This is a make me happy everyday tea.
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I love this tea
I adore this tea
Why am I still buying pu’erh samples?
For my tastes this is pretty much perfect.

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Went on a bit of a tea/teaware shopping spree last night. Ohhhhh Mandala – I love Mandala Tea, and was spending the evening trying to put together an order – it’s tough when there are so many awesome choices.
Anyway I was drinking the amazing Noble Mark while I was shopping. I love this tea. I don’t drink it often enough and I don’t write enough tasting notes about it. I was using my little yixing shou pot and stopped counting at 9 steeps – but I’m quite sure I got to at least 15. It just keeps getting smoother and more mellow as you go. It starts really nice and doesn’t go through any icky stages. Maybe not as “complex” as some like – but you know what your going to get with this one. It’s always good – it can handle some “oops I let that steep too long”. One of my all time favorite teas.
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Well, it looks like it’s finally time for me to break into the puerh reviewing game. While I drink a lot of puerh tea, I must admit that my palate for puerh, and shu (cooked/ripe) puerhs in particular, is not very refined. I certainly enjoy shu puerh teas from time to time, but most shu teas taste the same to me. I really enjoy the savory, earthy character of most cooked or ripe puerhs, but I generally can’t tell one quality shu puerh from another. I’m more of a sheng man at heart.

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This Mandala Phatty Cake is a shu puerh. For you non tea-drinkers (what are you doing here?!?!), this means it was artificially “cooked” to imitate an aged sheng (raw) puerh. This process usually involves piling the tea leaves in a warm, humid environment. The leaves are turned over regularly. In essence, the tea leaves are being composted.

This particular tea comes from Mandala Tea, an excellent tea shop and online tea store based in Rochester, Minnesota. The 2011 Phatty Cake is wildly popular in the internet tea world. Steepster, Reddit r/tea, and TeaChat are all full of glowing reviews for this shu puerh.

The leaves for this cake were picked in Lincang, Yunnan Province in 2006 and then ripened in 2007. In 2011, the ripened leaves were pressed into cute little 100 g cakes.

Dry Leaf

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Normally when I brew puerh, I like to break off a large chunk or two and then have a few smaller leaves in the pot as well. However, since I’m towards the very end of this cake I could only break off this giant piece. The dried leaves are darker brown, as shu puerhs tend to be. This cake has a lot more variety than most shu puerhs I’ve seen…there are some lighter brown leaves and some darker brown leaves. The leaf size ranges from tiny and almost dust like all the way to entire leaves.

This lovely chunk of shu has that deep, earthy smell that is typical of shu puerhs. The cake is very densely compacted, and was a bit hard to break apart with my tea pick.

Teaware

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For this tea, I used my designated shu yixing pot. I bought this lovely little guy in the Yingge Ceramics District of New Taipei City in Taiwan. I bought it from a group of old ladies on the side of the road that had a little teaware shop. I can never resist buying something from cute old Taiwanese ladies.

Brewed Tea

I weighed out 8 g of this tea for my sample. I gave this tea two ten second rinses. Normally I only give puerhs one rinse, but since this chunk of tea was so solid I thought it would need another ten seconds to open up.

The first steep was an incredibly dark shade of reddish-brown, approaching completely black. And this was only a 15 second steep! You can’t even see the bottom of the cup.

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You may notice the white mist on the surface of the tea. Apparently these are tiny microdroplets of water that are actually levitating above the surface of the tea. How fascinating! This phenomenon was discovered by Takahiro Umeki and his team of physicists out of Kyoto University in Japan.

You can read a bit more about it at http://www.marshaln.com/2015/01/that-white-mist/. http://www.marshaln.com is also one of the very best tea blogs on the internet, so you should check it out anyways. https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-mystery-of-the-white-mist-on-the-surface-of-black-coffee-a1a9624edfde also has a nice article about Umeki’s discoveries.

The first thing I noticed about this tea is that it is super clean tasting, as most other reviewers have noted. There is absolutely none of the “funk” of fishiness that you often find in shu puerhs. The initial taste is very leathery and earthy. This typical puerh flavor is boosted by a delicious savory taste, very mushroom like. As far as tea tastes go, mushroom might not be to your liking…but I certainly enjoyed it in this tea.Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of this tea is its texture. This tea is very thick and heavy, even for a shu. It is oddly filling, like a meal in a cup! The tea has a really pleasant sweet aftertaste.

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This is about the fourth or fifth steep. You can see that the tea has lightened up a little bit to a reddish-brown color. Even after five steeps, the tea is still incredibly heavy and thick. A lot of the mushroomy/savory notes have faded into a sort of medicinal or herbal note. This might not sound good, but I found it quite pleasant. There are so many flavors in this one puerhs. I was impressed by this tea’s complexity.

I lightened up the steep times to 8-10 seconds for the remaining steeps. I easily got over 15 steeps out of this one 8 g chunk of tea, and I certainly could have gotten some more out of the tea. This tea is incredibly strong and potent, as most reviewers have noticed. I love teas that have this aspect, but unless you are really into shu puerhs, I don’t think you would like this tea.

Finished Leaf

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The finished leaf is nothing too exciting to look at, since it’s a compressed puerh. But the leaves looked pretty full and high quality.

Conclusion

This is a good shu puerh, to put it simply. It’s incredibly strong and potent and will give you lots of repeated infusion. It’s a lot better than your standard $15 or $20 cake online. But at $19 for a 100 g cake, I don’t think I’ll be buying this tea again. It’s simply too pricy for what it gives. If you consider that most puerh cakes are 357 g, this tea would be in the $60 range if it were full sized. That’s pretty expensive for a shu puerh, and I wouldn’t pay that regularly for a shu puerh cake unless it really knocked my socks off. Maybe this just means that I’m too cheap :)

I’m happy I tried this tea though, and I’m happy that I supported Mandala Tea by buying it. If you are looking for an online tea vendor, you should give Mandala a look. They have a great selection and incredibly friendly customer service, even if the prices are a bit high for my tastes.

In my mind, I call this my ‘happy tea’. It tastes like sugar without being sweet, and it is bright without being acidic. How does an Oolong accomplish this? I will never know…

I’m tasting a flowery, sweet, happy cup of tea. It reminds me a bit of cotton candy – imagine drinking a lovely floral tea while standing within a mile of a cotton candy stand and being able to just barely identify the smell. Plus a gentle roasted note.

Nothing milky about this tea. It is very possible that I’m taking the title too seriously, and that the ‘milk’ in the milk oolong refers to its smoothness instead of any overt dairy flavor.

Unlike most of the new years resolutions I saw posted on various discussion threads, my resolution this year is to spend more money on tea. In prior years, my tea budget has always been sucked up by practical things, such as ‘food’ or ‘gas’, but not this year! I vow not to be practical, not to live off of old tea from my mother’s cupboard, and not to try to make my Christmas tea last all year. I think I can safely say that I’ve started January on track by purchasing a Breville one-touch and placing an order for this tea from Mandala.

As I’m drinking this particular tea, I’m not really tasting the ‘milk’ in the milk oolong. I get the floral and some sort of sweetness, but not any sort of creamy taste. It is possible that the much lauded ‘milk’ flavor is actually the smooth feel of the tea – but I can’t be sure. Additionally, I’m picking up a distinct chlorine flavor, which I fear must come from my tap water and may be overwhelming some of the subtler flavors in the tea. I must try this again with filtered water – because I am very curious about how a tea might taste milky without milk.

This will be a fast review because I have to go to work. This is a very tasty black tea, slightly malty, slightly sweet.

I brewed this once in an 18oz teapot with 3 tsp leaf and boiling water for 1 min.

Used 4.20 grams of leaf first time with this one.

(Did two quick rinses)
5/3/3/3/7/7/7/11/11

Bright, clean, & slightly smokey.
Infuses to a nice pale orange hue.
Smells fantastic brewed.
My little studio is overpowered with sheng aroma.

Very smooth tea no astringent properties for the first couple steeps!
Slightly sweet and greatly pleasant to sip.

Almost a citrus hint with a juicy “easy” drinking quality.
Calm but mentally focused chaqi.
I feel the heightened awareness starting to creep up.
Ima play with this one a few more times before final judgement but mandala tea has brought the good stuff yet again. ;-)

This is probably the only Shu Puer to really have earned my favor. I like Shu Puer in general, but aside from this one, none have ever really stood out to me as being unique or particularly enjoyable. Admittedly, I’ve probably had less than 10 different ones.

After a rinse this tea smells strongly of cacao and stone fruits. The brewed infusion tastes quite like unsweetened cacao, and in later infusions this is balanced by a dark fruit flavor something like dried fig or bing cherries. The aroma of the brewed liquor is like sugar cookies.

This one lasts plenty of infusions and delivers such a nice, rich flavor, with very little of the mustiness that most shu Puer have. I really like this. Best ripe Puer I’ve had so far!

Got this as a free sample with a Mandala order a while ago and am just now getting around to trying it. It is pretty good, only slightly malty. I am getting another note too, one I think is generally described as baked bread, quite flavorful.

I brewed this once in an 18oz teapot with the sample, around 6g and boiling water for 1 min.

Mmmmmmmmmmm I love Mandala pu’erh. This one is no exception. It’s just so comforting. Love how smooth it is. Love how dark it steeps. It just makes me happy.
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Hoping everyone on the East Coast is safe and warm.

This was a delicious treat for me this afternoon. One mini tuocha lasted through over a liter of water. Yay!

Not much to say on this one beyond the fact that it is my puerh for the day. I only wanted to have one to focus on today – maybe a few more tomorrow – because my other half is home today and we’re trying to get things done! :) Adore this tea and need to make sure i’ve always got some in my cupboard. While i’ve finally finished this sample, i still have the loose 2011 version in my cupboard so YAY!

dear god i love this tea. I’ve had it before, i’ll have it again and every time i have it, i’m all over it, slurping it down as fast as i can drink it up! today there’s a great spice note in this that is super tasty.

..and i’ll just hit save here since this tasting note has been open for hours since work distracted me haha

I hate it when reviews disappear. I pulled this one out to be my puerh for today after reading misslena’s tasting note on special dark. :) I haven’t had this one in a long while so i figured it was time to work on my sample of this, especially if i place a mandala order for special dark! I’ll be drinking this most of today and that suits me just fine. My little turtle needs more tea love and this is a great tea. I’d say it’s a toss up on any given day whether i’ll love this or special dark most :)

Tealizzy was kind enough to send me a sample of this tea! I have been curious about it for a while :)

And it lives up to the hype! Very complex, super sweet and apricotty, silky, a little floral and just enough tart/bitter notes to keep it interesting. Damnit, now I really want to order a cake! :D

I took some pics of my session-
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