Milk tea time: how Hongkongers are taking the drink to new heights to preserve tradition
- Sifu Good Tea reinvents drink by offering versions such as red date black sugar milk tea with gin, and rock sugar tangerine peel puer with vodka
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Hong Kong’s traditional milk tea goes upmarket
Some Hongkongers have reinvented milk tea, taking the city’s traditional drink upmarket in a bid to preserve it and challenge a debate that coffee should be more expensive.
Compared with its Taiwanese counterpart, known for its chewy tapioca pearls, Hong Kong-style milk tea has a rich flavour. It is made creamy with the addition of evaporated milk, and packs a long-lasting tannin punch from the carefully steeped and “pulled” mix of tea leaves.
City residents, according to industry estimates, indulge in 2.5 million cups of milk tea per day on average, with some saying it is in their DNA. A cup costs roughly HK$20 (US$2.66).
Gina Li Wai-shuen decided to turn milk tea, mostly consumed at local cafes, or cha chaan teng, into ready-to-drink bottles when dine-in restrictions were imposed during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
Li, who previously worked at an investment bank, co-founded Sifu Good Tea, offering various products ranging from HK$30 to as much as HK$78.
“The quality [of milk tea] seems to vary in different restaurants. We developed simple standards of our own version of tea and then we made our own tea blend,” she said.
