#bobaholic

Hi everyone! So I recently entered Mr. Green Bubble’s 2017 Instagram contest for the chance to win an iPhone X, a $100 gift card to Mr. Green Bubble, or a Mr. Green Bubble shirt! All of these prizes sound amazing because I’m a huge fan of Mr. Green Bubble and fresh-brew tea. 

Anyways, this is my entry for the contest, and it pieces together all original photos I took during my travels, which include the background, monuments, and moon =]

TLeaf - Roasted Delight

(Location: San Jose, CA)

TLeaf is one of the Bay Area boba places that uses teaspresso machines to fresh-brew their teas. I’ll have to say, I like the taste of tea made this way the best. It’s very potent and flavorful. The Alishan oolong tea is very nutty and strong, but at 75% sugar, it was just the slightest bit watery. At full sugar, this might be a 9 or a 10. The grass jelly came in cubes and wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked.

Mr. Green Bubble - Brown Rice Milk Tea

(Location: Union City, CA)

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels as if Mr. Green Bubble’s drinks have felt more watered down recently. This brown rice milk tea is not at the level of Chatime or Cool Tea Bar. The tea is well-brewed, but at 75% sugar, there’s not much else there to give the drink depth. It tasted a bit watered down and overly light. This is not as strong as other drinks Mr. Green Bubble has to offer, like their Earl Grey Milk Tea.

Teaspoon - Grasshopper

(Location: Milpitas, CA)

Over the past year or so, Teaspoon’s Grasshopper has really become one of the stars of the Bay Area’s boba scene. It’s lychee green tea with cucumber juice, but I’m tasting 90% cucumber juice, 10% green tea, and maybe 1% lychee if I try really hard to imagine it. Which isn’t a bad thing. The overall flavor is light and refreshing, with just the right amount of sweetness and none of that syrup-y, clearly artificial crap you usually get with fruit teas. So the final verdict is that this is one of the better fruit teas I’ve tried, even if it doesn’t deliver on all the flavors it promised.

Soyful Desserts - Creamy Milk Tea

(Location: Little Saigon, San Jose, CA)

The winner of the best milk tea at last year’s Boba Festival in San Jose deserves a second go on the blog. This drink is very, very flavorful. It has a complex flavor profile that’s rosy, flagrant, and sharp. The tea itself is harder to detect, and more so adds definition to the sweetness. As strong as the flavor is, though, the drink straddles a fine line between feeling light and watered down. With a thicker texture, this would almost be a perfect drink. The Japanese Pudding is great, and tastes like tofu-ish custard that is super smooth.

Tea Era - Roasted Barley Milk Tea

(Location: Mountain View, CA)

The hype for this drink and place just keeps growing, so I had to come back. At full sugar, I finally get what everyone’s talking about when they describe this drink, and I feel complicated about it. It’s so sweet and thick that I almost mistook this for a powdered drink, except I’ve tried it before at half sugar and can taste the barley tea, albeit in watered down form. Halfway through, the nuances of its coffee-ish flavor seep to the surface, and I can appreciate it more for how smoothly it blends the barley and sweetness. Still not as great as the hype suggests, though.

Verde - Frothy Milk Tea

(Location: Fremont, CA)

This just tastes like a powder milk tea. At 50% sugar, it tastes just as sweet as their frothy green milk tea did at full sugar. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of this drink, since it’s not super complex and the texture’s a bit heavy. It left me super full for some reason, though I got it with no toppings. Being kind of one-dimensional and overly sweet, I found this drink to be just alright.

U-Cha - Matcha Latte

(Location: Berkeley, CA)

I enjoyed this matcha latte. At 75% sugar, everything felt very balanced. There’s a slight bitterness to the matcha tea and a powdery texture for the drink as a whole, which is a sign that the matcha part’s legit. The creaminess of the drink is pretty standard as far as matcha lattes go. Smooth, noticeable, but not overwhelmingly heavy. The sweetness is subdued, not overwhelming the matcha. Everything synchs up pretty well. It’s a pretty solid drink.

Fantasia - Green Milk Tea

(Location: Milpitas, CA)

This is one of those old-school green milk teas that’d you’d find from a Tenren or AU79. Very creamy and smooth, with a noticeable and and sharp tea flavor. The sweetness is also very sharp, and everything’s just together in terms of taste. Like there’s not a lot of complexity going on, and it’s just a very solid milk tea with tea flavor and a creamy texture. I enjoyed it.

Happy Lemon - Salted Cheese Green Tea

(Location: Cupertino, CA)

This drink was alright. The flavor profile felt a bit heavy-handed. It’s like a lot of the Taiwanese chains feel they have to make their drinks extra sweet in the US, so I should have just ordered this at 50% sugar or something. The tea’s there, but it’s overshadowed by the sweetness, as is the salted cheese. The savory flavor of the creama/milk foam is masked by a really sharp sweetness. It’s a bit too sweet for me, but it’s still a nice drink.

Teasociety - Blazinga

(Location: Milpitas, CA)

Teasociety adds onto the customization culture of the boba world by allowing you to choose the strength of your tea in addition to levels of sugar, ice, etc. At strong tea and less sugar, everything’s a bit more pronounced. The tea flavor’s nutty and roasted tasting, which is great. The sweetness level at 80% is still sharp. The creaminess level is light, and everything’s solid. As a roasted milk tea, the Blazinga’s just got a very sharp flavor profile that’s different from the rest.

Lattea - Green Tea Lattea

(Location: Taipei, TW)

So coming to Taipei, my favorite milk foam/creama/sea salt places were of course Gong Cha, Sharetea, etc. After having a few conversations with some of the locals, I found out that these places don’t actually do as well in Taiwan as they do elsewhere. Surprise! And Lattea is the place that really hits it off with people in Taipei when it comes to the famed milk foam/sea salt green tea. The tea here is both fragrant and potent, and the sweetness is perfect at regular sugar. The milk foam part of the lattea is very subtle, which is great for adding nuance to the texture, though it’s a bit harder to detect the butteriness or saltiness of other milk foam drinks I’ve tried. Is this top tier stuff? Absolutely. Does it replace Gong Cha and Co. for having the best variant of creama/milk foam/sea salt drinks? Still not sure about that.

Ice Monster - Bubble Tea Sensation

(Location: Taipei, TW)

Chen San Ding - Qing Wa Zhuang Nai

(Location: Taipei, TW)

So I was really excited to try Chen San Ding when I first landed in Taipei, because everybody on every site seemed to say that this is THE boba to get in Taipei. So imagine my hesitance when nobody I met in Taipei heard of it before. After trying it, though, I felt no regrets. While the milk is just milk, it quickly became a caramelized and sweet drink that’s akin to the iced milks in LA. That’s because the boba itself is hands down THE best boba ever. It is so, so chewy and QQ, and filled with so much sweetness that mixing it a little transformed the milk from bland to great better than Maybelline commercials. And to top it off, this is the first time I’ve had boba that was HOT. That’s right, it didn’t just come out warm, it came out so hot at the bottom of the cup that I can’t even keep my hands there for a long time. So well-cooked.

Ching Shin - Duo Duo Nu

(Location: Taipei, TW)

I went to Ching Shin in Taipei on the unanimous recommendation of three Taipei locals who I met on Elephant Mountain, and felt vindicated when everybody in line before me ordered the same drink they told me to order. The Duo Duo Nu is basically a yogurt green tea in which the distinct yogurt flavor often competes with the fainter tea. Maybe it would taste better at half sugar, but halfway through the drink the tea clearly lost this battle. Overall, it was alright.

Tea Patea - Pudding Milk Tea

(Location: Taipei, TW)

Tea Patea is an offshoot of Chun Shui Tang, which is the boba cafe that INVENTED boba. Yep, and as expected, it delivered in a big way with this one. The tea is super powerful and potent, bordering on nutty and smoky. The texture is very creamy, and included hints of crushed ice to add to the thickness. It all came together very seamlessly, without one aspect of the drink distracting from the other. The pudding is also rich and creamy, and I enjoyed every sip of this regal drink.

Chun Shui Tang - Bubble Milk Tea

(Location: Xinyi, Taipei, TW)

Chun Shui Tang is the boba shop that invented boba. Let’s let that sink in for a minute. Their milk tea is very nice and smoky (well, almost). The amount of milk powder is just enough for it to be nicely creamy without being too much or overwhelming the tea. The boba is surprisingly average, being chewy but not perfectly QQ. The cup is actually a really nice touch, because it funnels all the boba to the bottom where your straw’s at, so you’d always get a boatload of boba with each sip.