2020 'Kuura-Cola' Ripe Pu-erh Tea
Everyday ripe pu-erh.
You can purchase our new 2024 KUURA-Cola here.
KUURA-Cola® is our mainstay in-house ripe puerh tea cake. A blend of material fermented in 2018 and 2019, and pressed in 2020, with the goal of providing an affordable, clean, and workhorse ripe puer for daily drinking.
If you’re new to puerh tea, ripe puerh is the most common kind you’ll come across out in the wild, rather than raw or sheng puerh. The tea undergoes wet-pile fermentation for a period of around 40-60 days, turning the tea very dark, rich, and smooth. This process was originally intended as a way to accelerate the ageing of a raw puerh tea, but has evolved into its own style.
When brewed, the tea is dark brown and opaque — looking similar to filter coffee — and has a thick, rich, earthy flavour and fragrance, with no bitterness. Ripe puerh can sometimes be a little ‘funky’ or have a some fermented qualities in the taste or smell, but with clean processing and some time to age, the result is an smooth and soothing tea.
If you’ve never tried a ripe puerh before, it’s one of the most obviously different styles of tea and unlikely to be similar to anything you’ve tried before. If you’re familiar with the style, we can say this particular tea was produced and blended to be clean, thick, and durable, with a sweet-leaning fragrance, sometimes hinting toward vanilla or sweet wood.
Some people can be particularly sensitive to any sort of fermentation fragrance or flavour; whilst this tea has had some time to age since it’s production, we’d encourage you to let the cake rest a little after shipping to have time to acclimatise. We also like to rinse all ripe puerh twice with boiling water at the beginning of brewing, rather than just once. Rinsing twice prior to infusion helps to open the leaves up and cleans out any lingering fermentation funk.
Wrapper artwork by Sprinks.
Pictures by Pingle Pictures.
2018 + 2019 tea material produced in Yunnan, China, pressed in 2020.
200g per compressed cake, with 5 cakes per traditionally wrapped bamboo tong.