XPP Matcha Mix Milk Tea and The Alley Lujiaoxiang Peach Oolong Pearl Milk Tea
A few weeks ago, I had a lovely day out in London’s Chinatown where – amongst other adventures – I had boba tea for the first time.
(Mine was the mango one on the right.)
Boba tea originated in Taiwan in the early 1980s. It generally has tapioca “bubbles” bobbing around at the bottom and seems to be quite the popular beverage amongst people who are younger and cooler than me.
I purchased a couple of do-it-yourself boba tea kits so I could recreate the whole boba experience at home. They came in takeaway-style cups with a nifty selection of little sachets inside.
XPP Matcha Mix Milk Tea
First up was XPP Matcha Mix Milk Tea. The instructions said that this tea could be drunk hot or cold. I went for the hot option, mostly because the cold option required ice cubes. I don’t know what kind of household XPP think I’m running here, but it certainly isn’t one where I have a supply of ice cubes ready at the drop of a cat.
There were sachets of milky matcha powder, tapioca boba pearls and – surprisingly – some raisins. I emptied them all into the cup, added hot water, mixed it all up and prepared myself for a new and exotic taste experience.
Oh God, it was disgusting. I used to think I didn’t like matcha. Before I tried proper, legit matcha, my only experience had been matcha-flavoured soft drinks and KitKats and the like. These always had a taste that was reminiscent of dustbins.
This tea tasted just like that, only a bit worse. If I were to describe the taste (and really, I’ve only just gotten over it, so I don’t know why I’m making myself relive the trauma), I’d say it tastes of seaweed, earth, spinach, milk powder and an eye-watering amount of sugar.
The gunk at the bottom of the cup isn’t much better. The raisins (which were clearly sultanas, but let’s not split hairs here) were probably all right, but they were all mixed with the tasteless starchy tapioca balls, and I couldn’t be bothered to try to extricate them.
I should have just eaten the rais-tanas straight from the packet beginning of the process. Then at least, there would have been something palatable.
The Alley Lujiaoxiang Peach Oolong Pearl Milk Tea
Next up, was The Alley Lujiaoxiang Peach Oolong Pearl Milk Tea. At least it couldn’t be any worse than XPP Matcha Mix Milk Tea. And happily, it wasn’t. It wasn’t nice exactly but it wasn’t actively disgusting. So, all in all, life was looking up.
There weren’t any instructions in English on the packaging, so I looked it up online. I discovered that this one is only intended to be drunk hot. There were four sachets here, one of which was an oolong tea bag, which should have been my first clue regarding the whole needs-to-be-made-hot business.
The other packets contained peach flavoured milk powder, starch balls, and a little pot of brown sugary syrup. The syrup was the nicest part of the whole exercise. It sank to the bottom of the cup and I managed to tip it all over my chin when I tried to drink the last dregs.
The weird thing about The Alley Lujiaoxiang Peach Oolong Pearl Milk Tea is that I started with a perfectly serviceable cup of oolong before smothering it in milk powder, sugar and tapioca pearls. It seemed rather disrespectful.
I can absolutely do without tapioca balls in my life. The things are more ‘packaging material’ than ‘food’. But I do appreciate that they’re rather integral to the boba tea experience.
And credit where credit’s due. I have to hand it to the dissolvability of the sugary, peach-flavoured milk powder. When I dumped it into my tea, I didn’t expect it to dissolve as well as it did. I anticipated clumpy pockets of powder, but it melted away completely in a way that cup-a-soups and chocolate Nesquik can only dream of.
It’s poor compensation for a cup of tea ruined, though.
Would I Drink Boba Tea Again?
I don’t think I shall be returning to boba tea anytime soon. Both these drinks had actual tea in them, but once you’ve added all the other business, you wouldn’t know it. What you get is an unusually-flavoured, extraordinarily sugary milk drink. And, well, as it turns out, that’s not really my cup of tea.
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I also am not cool enough to appreciate tapioca balls in my tea.