Tea: Kallisti Raw Puer Blend Type: Raw Puer (生普洱） Region: Lincang, Jingmai, Xishuang Banna Harvest: April 2025 Press Date: May 2025 2025 Tasting Notes: Baked Cake, Sage, Berry Skin, Rock Candy, Cedar Wood Incredibly drinkable, friendly to all who try it, difficult to brew improperly, and most affordable of all our puer, the Kallisti is the golden apple, a blend to impress even the fairest drinker. We worked hard on this one, endlessly revising it until it checked all our boxes without costing an arm and a leg, it really is our ideal daily drinker. With material from Lincang, Jingmai, and Xishuang Banna, this blend was only made possible after so many years of sourcing tea from many mountains in many regions. We knew we wanted the sweetness of Lincang, the minerality and longevity of Xishuang Banna, and the fragrant fruitiness of Jingmai. This blend is the gestalt of all our hard blending work. When the dry leaves are placed in a warmed gaiwan and shaken to open the fragrance, there exudes a powerful aroma of fragrant wood and mineral rock with something sweet like a freshly baked vanilla glazed cinnamon roll hiding in the background. When infused with boiling water, the leaves reveal their fruity side, showing fragrances of dark berry skin and vanilla. The brew itself is light gold and surprisingly thick on the tongue. While the mouthfeel is pleasantly oily, the tea is still relatively light, with higher notes of sweetness available to the palate. As the session continues, the sweetness becomes something redolent of fresh baked white cake, but there are a few dynamic infusions early on where floral notes compete with berry fruit flavors. While this blend only has a dash of gushu material, we find it thoroughly engaging from first steep to last, while delivering a pleasant chaqi that powers us through the day. We offer this tea in 25 gram samples (chunks lovingly pried off the cake), whole 200 gram cakes, and a set of 5 cake tongs wrapped in bamboo leaves and totaling 1000 grams. If you're interested in sampling this year's full flight of puer pressings, check out the Yunnan Flight, a set of 6 dragon balls from different regions each pressed in 7 gram balls for convenient brewing. If you've been buying from us for a while, and trust our taste, we have bundled all the cakes together into one single Product a Bundle Tong of sorts at 10% off their individual prices (similar to our tong pricing). We recommend brewing this tea gongfu style in a gaiwan or Chinese teapot. We use 6 grams of tea in a 100ml brewing vessel with boiling water, steeping 5 second for the first few infusions and adding 5 seconds after ever subsequent infusion. Most of these puer teas can be re-infused over 15 times, when brewing in this gongfu style. Never bought a cake before, learn how to break it up with a tea pick on our YouTube.
