What kind of black or green tea to use when making pearl milk tea?
Hi, thanks for taking the time. I’d just like to know what brands of black tea or jasmine green tea is strong enough because i use Lipton and it’s no where near strong enough. Does the black tea need to be made with tea leaves or something similar? Oh and this is a secondary question that I’m just curious about; how do the pearl milk tea shops make such strong tea in such a big quantity? That must cost a lot of money. Thanks once again.
September 25th, 2010 at 1:27 pm
don’t use lipton, because it’s a weak tea. one teaspoon of tea inside a teabag isn’t gonna do it if you want a strong tea.
if you want strong tea, you need to buy loose black tea, preferably assam (english breakfast), or a assam/ceylon mix (british afternoon tea). you can buy black tea in an asian supermarket too. they also have lots of green tea like jasmine, and oolong. for green, i would get a simple green, not jasmine unless you want it. for a roasted flavor, i would get ti kuan yin which is a darker roast of oolong.
if you don’t have an asian supermarket near you, look for an indian supermarket. indian supermarkets should have one of the ctc teas like brooke bond red label, or lipton yellow label. ctc (“crush tear curl”) teas are dirt cheap, but delivery 5x the flavor, it’s like the crack of the tea world, it’s the tea that chai masala is made from.
the last case scenario is to look at your gourmet market, or at least whole foods market. and look for yorkshire tea, it will be expensive, but the tea bags are large and make a very strong and tasty tea.
as for tea shops makign tea. tea leaves can be cheap depending on the grade they use. 1st grade tea (for drinking tea, not bubble tea) can cost upwards of hundreds of dollars a pound, but bubble tea places usually buy the cheap stuff, or blends to smoothen out the flavor. they don’t use tea bags.
September 25th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
If Lipton is too weak, forget about green tea. It’s not as oxidized as the black. Try some jasmine black or some rose. Hell, try any tea you can drink. It’s okay to make your tea a bit stronger if it’s not flavorful enough. By pearl milk do you mean the Bubble tea phenom using pearl tapioca? If so, change the tea to milk ratio.