History of Bubble Tea

What is Bubble Tea Series (2 of ?)

First of all there is some contention on the history of bubble tea but what we do know for sure:

Bubble Tea Originates from Taiwan
Bubble Tea Originated in the 1980’s

The most noteworthy origin story of Bubble Tea is that it was born in one of Taichung City’s tea houses, specifically at Chun Shui Tang Teahouse. The founder of Chun Shui Tang Teahouse, Liu Han-Chieh, first came up with the idea of serving Chinese tea cold in the early 1980’s, after visiting Japan where he saw coffee being served cold, as a result this gave him the idea to serve cold milk tea, which did relatively well.

Skip forward a few years to a staff meeting one fateful day in 1988, where the tea house manager, Ms Lin Hsiu Hui, being compelled by boredom (meetings right!) dropped her a sweetened tapioca pudding into her iced milk tea and drank it, and eureka! As a result, Bubble Tea was born.

It seems like everyone at the meeting loved the drink too! It quickly outsold all the other iced teas within a couple of months. Hip hip for boring staff meetings and hooray for playing with your food!

Some interesting facts about Bubble Tea:

The ‘bubble’ in Bubble Tea does not refer to the delicious toppings (which are at the bottom) but rather the froth, aka bubbles, in the milk tea that come about when the tea is shaken over ice.
Boba in Japan is slang for big boobs, no jokes, and well the tapioca pearls round shape are named after them.

Original Milk Tea

Traditional Bubble Tea (aka milk tea) with a contemporary twist of Granadila Bursting Boba

As you may well have gathered with the short history of bubble tea above, the OG of Bubble Tea is a strong black tea with sugar and milk, commonly called boba tea or milk tea, that is shaken over ice to make it cold and then served with black tapioca pearls (we’ll get to what these guys are a little later) and enjoyed with a big fat straw; we highly recommend you buy your own reusable Bubble Tea Straw.

Bubble Tea these days covers a wide variety of drinks, some of which do not even have a drop of tea in them, although the Bubble Tea purists will fiercely debate this… so be warned.

What seems to hold together the common theme of Bubble Tea nowadays, what makes it special compared to the normy drinks are the delicious toppings that are served with the drink.

To see what types of drinks and types of toppings there are these days keep reading this blog post thread…

History of Bubble Tea

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