Bubblelicious Tea | Premier UK and Europe Bubble Tea Supplier

TenRen’s is a specialty tea shop, selling all varieties of tea from tea bags to loose tea leaves like Monkey Pick Tea and Dragon Well Tea.  Any tea based paraphernalia (tea strainers, tea sets, tea-pots – you get the picture!) can also be found here.  The branch we visited was in Pacific Place Mall.

The bubble tea section is a protruding wooden stand just on the shop front with the menu clearly printed in Chinese and English. The menu was not as extensive as the previous place we reviewed but all the flavour combinations seemed appealing and complimented each other well. It has to be said that we wouldn’t have minded trying every single drink we saw on the menu – thumbs up! (That’s quality over quantity and we could not agree with it more!)

It was also laid out very well into different sections – Pearl Milk Tea’s and Pearl Ice Tea’s (which have the option of coming either cold, hot or slush). You then have Fresh Fruit Slush and Fresh Fruit & Milk Slush. All drinks come in one standard size (500ml) and are ordered to go as there is no seating available inside.

Apart from bubble tea there is also the option of getting some fresh hot brewed tea made with some of their specialty tea leaves and ‘Tea Eggs’ - again a great idea as it is a simple snack which can be prepared with the ingredients they so readily have.

We ordered a Plum Green Tea from the Pearl Ice Tea menu and a Taro Red Bean Milk Slush from the Fresh Fruit & Milk Slush menu, both drinks coming to a total of CAD$10.00. The young girl serving us kindly informed us that the Plum Green Tea was made using preserved plums and that it was quite sour in taste.

The drinks came served in the TenRen personalised cup with a cartoon sealing film (don't forget to check out our Breezy Wander sealing films out next week). We liked that the tapioca was actually floating around the cup and not clumped together at the bottom. As big drinkers of bubble tea it’s the small details like this which make the difference.

The Plum Green Tea was a hit with us! It was a little sweet but if it was any less sweet the tartness may have set your teeth on edge. The sweet n’ sourness was really quite addictive. As it was made with preserved plums it also had a kind of salty undertone to it – it just made it all the more stimulating. The dried plums were actually floating around inside the drink so once we had finished the drink and sucked up every last boba we ripped off the film and fished around for them. Scavengers eh?!

The Taro Red Bean Milk Slush was made with fresh ingredients. Once again we were impressed. It had the perfect slush consistency, like frozen sand – some places get it completely wrong and have little chunks of ice which get stuck in the straw and make your BBT just…well, unsuckable??

Fresh taro has a delicate flavour but there was enough there to taste it and just enough red bean not to overpower it. The sugar level was also good, with such delicate flavours like taro and red bean if it is too sweet it will supress the taste and if it isn’t sweet enough it will taste bland. We like to call this the ‘Goldilocks Effect’ and by that we mean it has to be ‘just right’!

The tapioca for both had a nice QQ to it and a good sweetness. TenRen know their stuff and it’s not hard to see why they are one of the forerunners in bubble tea across Canada and North America.

The Bubblelicious Tea team can provide you with personalised cups, personalised seals, generic seals, fat straws, tea and bubble tea components to make your unit every bit as tasty for the UK and European market.

In the end we decided upon:

All with tapioca might we add – but they do have quite an extensive topping list too, with everything from jellies to red bean (did we spot Golden Grahams on there too?)

Service was fast but strictly no photos inside! The damage was CAD$19.25 and the drinks came served in a plastic bag big enough to hold all four. Once we had found a place to sit down and enjoy our drinks it was time for the all-important taste test! All the drinks were served in a generous 700ml cup. First up – the Green Apple Green Tea!

At first slurp it ticked all the boxes – nice blend of tea, you could still taste it under the apple flavour. However it was really sweet! It got quite sickly towards the end! Next up was the Milk Tea. Once again it was far too sweet! The sweetness made it somewhat impossible to taste the other flavours properly. You could taste the Assam tea but only just about. It's saving grace was a perfect amount of ice.

The Strawberry Lychee Coconut Milk sounded very enticing but upon tasting it was disappointing. This was made with real fruit so the consistency was thicker than that of the first two drinks. Again, the sugar levels were too much! You can taste the strawberry but the coconut tasted really artificial and probably overpowered whatever lychee flavour was supposed to be there.

The best of the four was the Powdered Taro. This drink had slush like consistency and unlike the other three had the perfect sweetness and a lovely creamy texture. It wasn’t the best taro we had tried but they do have a fresh taro option which was good to see as not many places have this.

The tapioca for all the drinks we’d have to say was standard and stayed with the theme of being alittle too sweet. It also lacked the caramel-like flavour we love so much. Overall – slightly over-rated for what is supposedly the best bubble tea in Calgary. Although the menu is extensive many of the flavours do not go well, it would probably be better to go for a less extensive menu but using flavours which actually work well with each other. Having such a huge selection also means choosing what you want is much more time consuming.

They did have the cutest sealing film however – but that alone might not be enough for us to ‘TryAgain’...