Bubble Tea

A visit to an Eastern/Asian Supermarket is always fun if slightly expensive and possibly results in filling cupboards and shelves with inedible food that will gather dust and rot away over many years...but not this time. You see Bubble Tea has been discovered, tea that has morphed from bubble cocktails (or maybe the other way round), one of them must have come first but I've no idea which. The tea is a mixture/powder that you add boiling water to like a Pot Noodle, then you add/stir in the bubbles from a sachet. Pretty simple really, all you have to do is decipher the simple Korean script. 

The bubbles of course aren't bubbles at all, they are pea sized beads of...tapioca. I've noticed that use of the word tapioca often results in a violent reaction from the listener. It seems tapioca is not cool and is viewed as a kind of school dinner poison and torture device administered by totalitarian regimes that has traumatised generations, apart from me that is. Get over your past folks it's just a weird cereal thingy in a cup. Once brewed (?) you slowly sip the tea and bubble mix through a wide and squeezy straw via a punched out hole in the lid. The taste is basically like tea made with condensed milk, very sweet and milky, the tapioca adds a strange and slightly unsettling consistency that is strangely pleasant...after a while. 

OK I'd concede it's an acquired taste but if, like me you're a little fed up of milky lattes and bitter flat whites and frothy froth that's dressed up as a volcanic Cappuccino  then perhaps it's time to experiment with the other non-bubble bubbles. The teas appear to come in a variety of flavours, none of which I can translate or properly describe but it's still worth a tasty try, particularly when topped of with a green tea filled Panda Chocy Biscuit.

I seems that there are gods who are lonely, who knew? They also make noodle pots and crisps.