Pouchong

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!

My boyfriend brought me a tremendous amount of Chinese teas in teabags to sample. Ten Ren’s Pouchong was one of them. I’m a relatively new tea drinker, without much experience in any particular tea, but I’m aware that pouchong falls somewhere between the greens and the oolongs.

This tea has an almost floral fragrance on the nose. The tea itself steeps to a goldenrod/yellow color. The flavor? Very mild. It goes down smooth, with a slight, green, vegetal flavor at the beginning, that develops into something richer (I assume this is the oolong flavor, although since I’ve never really had an oolong tea, I can’t be entirely sure). My cup was gone in 10 minutes. I do think the tea got a bit astringent towards the bottom of the cup (some dust managed to escape the bag and congregated at the bottom of my cup), but the entire experience was mild, pleasant, and delicious!

Good choice for an everyday green tea.