Ten Ren

Good everyday green.

Unpleasantly sweet.

Much too sweet for me.

A rich and smooth dark oolong that is more mellow than nutty. Holds up fairly well to multiple infusions and is one of the better ones that I’ve had in some time.

I love this tea so much! You can brew it over and over again, and it really does have a lovely vegetal yet light and sweet taste. And a little goes a long way – a tiny scoop of the tea expands into large, flavourful leaves during brewing. It’s my staple tea.

This Tung Ting has quickly become one of my favourite everyday green oolongs and has left me with a desire to explore more of its type.
It is affordable and has a flavour profile that lies between the peaches and cream of Jin Xuan and the Green Floral of a green TGY. It is a good stepping off point for those who want to expand their horizons with green oolongs but are not sure if they will enjoy a floral green.

The dry leaves are a tightly rolled olive green with wide bands of a darker Khaki green. With carefully managed steepings, the leaves have lots of flavour in them. During this Brew session I am currently on the 10th steeping and they are still are offering a rich flavour. I brewed them in a Gaiwan with steepings starting at 30s and increasing 5s each time until the last 2 sessions which were around 90s.

Brewed the scent and flavour profile has included gardenia, orchid, cream , cinnamon, floral spice, peaches both fresh and poached, cantelope and vanilla throughout the steepings.

The floral spice was dominant through out the first 4 steepings followed by undertones of fruit and cream. The floral, fuit, and spice tones were relatively equally balanced through out the middle steepings and the soft fruit flavours maintained dominance in the later sessions with the floral tones and spice tones slowly dissipating.

The spent leaves are fairly large with rich green with reddish brown oxidized edges.

Quite a nice and affordable option for someone who wishes to explore this type of oolong.

This tea has been opened for a while so it is starting to loose some of its potency, but when opened if I was careful I could steep it about 11 times, 7 or 8 of which would have really developed flavour.

This is a green anxi style oolong with tightly rolled spring green leaves when dry. After a wash I steeped this tea 6 times this time before I stopped. This tea can be quite spicy and bitter so ten ren recommended short steeping times starting at 10 seconds and moving up at 5 second intervals. This tea is the most floral of the oolongs that I own that I have tried at the moment its flavours develops into a spicy floral referencing gardenia in scent and taste with a strong bitter undertone. Throughout the various steepings it also exhibited notes of a citrus overtone, spicy peach, spinach and green beans moving to the sweet yet bitter taste of coooked greens. It leaves a tingling on the side and back of the tongue and and a dryness at the front of the mouth. This is not my favourite oolong, but it has left me with a desire to taste more floral oolongs and is still an enjoyable experience in itself.

It’s nice and strong. I’m not a huge fan of Ten Ren teas in general, but I’ve had fairly positive experiences tasting their teas that are brewed in house.

My wife bought this tea for me at the local Asian supermarket. After just a few pots it has become one of my all time favorites. It has an amazingly smooth, almost “creamy” or “velvety” flavor and aroma. The Ginseng is very subtle and only helps to enrich the aroma. Best part is you can easily get 3 or 4 draws from it which actually makes it quite inexpensive.

Actually found this tin laying around the office unwanted. Enjoyed it many times and happend to look it up one day during an Oolong phase of mine in Jan 13. I was surprised to see how expensive it was. As a reference price Adagio sells it for $34 for a 3oz bag ($.91/cup).

Golden yellow color. Rich flavor. I can’t brew it enough times in the day to get it to weaken. Still very rich and strong on the 7th brew!

Loose
Appearance: grey green med crinkle leaf, no jasmine buds or flowers
Aroma when Dry: fruity floral, deeply sweet, deserty
After water is first poured: syrupy sweet, floral, nutty
At end of steep: sticky floral sweet
Tea liquor:
At end of steep: pale green
Staple? No
Time of day preferred: any
Taste:
At first: deserty, slightly fruity like floral sticky rice
As it cools ? floral notes open, stickyness lessens
Additives used (milk, honey, sugar etc)? no
Lingers? Yes, creamy, jammy cloying floral sweetness

Second steep (6min)
Same characteristics

I bought this tea at a tea shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and I absolutely love it. It’s one of my favorite teas. I steep the teabag in boiling water for 4-5 minutes. The taste isn’t too earthy, just very light and fresh.

I had some ginger tea at the Golden Wok a few months ago, and have been trying to find something that imitates the flavor. I really like the ginger flavor. It gets spicier as it cools, which is spectacular.

Personally every time I tried to brew this one hot I got less than ideal results, so I only make this one in a Mr. Coffee Ice Tea maker. Personally I like darker oolongs to blacks when it comes to ice tea but I keep this on hand for the people that like their tea to be lighter. It is one that I do not mind drinking as ice tea but there are ones that I like a lot better. The bulk of this tea goes to making batches of ice tea for my girlfriend and my grandmother so if both of them love it a lot it can’t be that bad even if it is not my personal favorite.

I just realized my last tasting note of this tea was so old and frankly outdated. I brought some of this tea at the office and had some usually with lunch and in the afternoon. The more I drank it, the more I liked it. I just know it will provide me with the perfect brew, quite delicate, slightly grassy, very mild though flavorsome. I never have had any problem sleeping even when I drank my last cup around 6pm. I did up to 7 brews with the same leaves and could probably have gone on for quite a few more rounds, as the flavor was still there.
The price was outrageous – I rediscovered the bill some time ago when tidying my papers and wide-eyed I checked that I was not mistaken, then I wondered how I could have paid such a price for 150g of tea. Thinking of it back now, I realize it was not that much, as a very small quantity (less than 5 beads for one cup) does the trick and works with as many steeps as more.
Every time I realized the number of beads in my office small tin were getting scarce, I had to restock it as I could not imagine not being able to drink it at lunch. That’s the only tea I brought to the office that made me do that – all the others (flavored all of them) I had to change and replace by a new one after a few weeks, even if I restocked a few of them once or twice before changing. This one, no, I really feel now that it’s a basic I cannot live without.
This explains my upgraded and almost perfect rating.
I’ll have to try other oolong, but I have to admit I’m wary of being disappointed.

I thought I had reviewed this one already.
One day I went tourist shopping in Singapore Chinatown, entered a tea shop, tasting the tea-du-jour, a nice oolong, wandered and smelled almost all the varieties available, as I had lots of time and there were nobody in the shop anyway. Their product range was definitely on “simple” green and oolong, plus some black, some pu-erh and lapsang souchong (I usually do not like the taste of those two last, just the smell is enough to tell me I do not feel like drinking that); nothing flavored, except maybe some jasmine.
I have to confess, I am far from a specialist in teas and usually tend more on the side of “I like drinking something with a nice taste”, hence my preference for flavored teas.
I decided to give a chance to a Taiwanese oolong, as the cup I had tried was rather nice (though not really available for sale for a reason I could not understand and which seems totally stupid).
I settled on choosing the most expensive of the common range, excluding the exceptional with off-the-charts pricing teas, which I am not knowledgeable enough to appreciate to their value.
At the smell, it smells greener and less astringent than the other ones; I had the feeling when smelling it that it would hardly turn bitter, while I had some doubts about even the second best. It comes as small pearls/beads, very nice to look at, quite convenient for serving IMO and hiding usually nice leaves.
The first times I brewed this tea in my usual big teapot, which was not a great idea. Recommended steeping time is to be short but it does not work so well with big water quantities, so I tended to oversteep and it turned a little bit bitter / not so nice. Another problem was that the leaves couldn’t expand nicely, as I use a teaball (I’ve got to get a filter though).
Today, I finally decided to try it, chinese style, with the gaiwans I also got in this shopping spree, and which I usually just use as regular cup. I’m a bit of a klutz and have to use the two of them – one to brew the tea, then the other to be poured in to drink after steeping. Thus I could try the first 60s first steeping (well more around 75 s), 40s second, 40s third and 50s following.
It’s better : no bitterness at all and a very green, very fresh taste. I have the feeling I could resteep the same leaves many times.
And the surprise was when I realized how big the leaves really were : around 6 to 7 cm ! I had never seen leaves this big unbroken before.

As a conclusion, after all this ranting, I’m glad I bought this tea as it really has a very delicate taste and contributes to further my education in fine teas. In my inexperience, I’m not sure oolong can get much better. Maybe it’ll grow more on me and I’ll feel more often willing to drink it as opposed to flavored tea, now that I know how to prepare it.

As soon as I saw the word lychee, I knew that I had to try. It’s one of my favourite fruits, how could I resist? I found this tea quite good & plan on purchasing it again in the future.

So I’m just getting started with teas—I’ve always generally been a cold-drinks kind of person and have never bothered obtaining a palate for tea, until now! I feel like it’s something worth trying (and, as I don’t drink coffee but am constantly nodding off, feel that a source of caffeine would do me good).

This is the first tea that I’ve tried and have actually, thoroughly enjoyed! It had a toasty, satisfying aftertaste that I could still distinctly feel hours afterward (like a phantom taste… or a craving). It was absolutely delicious! My previous attempts at green teas were bitter, oversteeped disasters, but after a little more education I’m proud to say I finally had a wonderful tea experience. :)

Excellent. Smooth, crisp, vegetal, sweet, and a bit chocolaty. The infused leaves have a bit of a musky smell, but retain their green nose in the infusion. Transforms steep after steep.

Later this afternoon I really wanted another cup of tea, but I didn’t want to use up my sachets I brought with me. So I poked around inside the cupboard in the staff lounge and filched a bag of this out of a large pouch. Normally I wouldn’t steep a pouchong at boiling, but that’s what the instructions on the back of the wrapper said, so I did. I was afraid it would be bitter or otherwise oversteeped, but it was almost the opposite. Maybe these teabags are really old, but there wasn’t much flavor to this cup. The aroma was somewhat unexpected, as I haven’t ever had a pouchong that was this roasty toasty. Actually it kind of reminded me of some kind of genmaicha, because it had that toasted rice aroma along with kind of a grassy green-ness. Not really my thing, but not bad. Too bad it didn’t taste like much!

I bought this tea on Ebay. A terrible mistake. The tea was tasteless, with little woody fragrance which was gone after the first steep. It was a second Ten Ren tea I had an opportunity to try and I wish I had not. Their products are at best mediocre.

My every day drinking tea. The owner of the Ten Ren shop on Eccles Ave. in San Francisco promised me that I would enjoy this tea and he was right. I find it has a cleaner taste than other types of Dragon Well tea that I have tried. Plus, the affordable price of this tea allows it to be a tea that you can enjoy throughout the day.

I recently received this as a gift from my boyfriend who had a co-worker pick it up for him in Taiwan. I wonder if I got different tea than Charles did because mine does not seem roasted at all.

This is a very light brew with the small of gardenias and a touch of freshly shucked corn. It has one of the sweetest finishes I’ve ever experienced in an Alishan. I am preparing this gong fu style and I accidentally spilled my first infusion but the second is very nice.

After the third infusion the tea started to open up a bit more and give forth some slightly buttery flavors, but this is very light and delicate. The flavor is so subtle it is a bit like a white tea. Definitely going on my list of things to cold brew!

I found this to be a very soothing and relaxing afternoon tea.