The smell of a Taichung afternoon
I can still bring it back if I close my eyes — the heat sitting on the pavement, the rattle of a tea shop shaker, that sweet milky smell drifting out onto the street. I grew up in Taichung, and bubble tea wasn’t a treat there. It was just the drink. The thing you ordered without thinking on the walk home from school.
It feels strange and lovely that the drink I took for granted as a kid is now the one people line up for at our counter in Adelaide.
Where it actually started
People assume bubble tea is some recent invention. It isn’t. The story most of us in Taichung grew up hearing is that it came together in a local tea house back in the 1980s. Iced milk tea was already popular. Someone tipped a serve of sweet tapioca into theirs more or less on a whim, kept stirring, and the chewy pearls earned their place.
Taichung is widely credited as the home of bubble tea, and as luck would have it, it’s home to me too. So when I make it, I’m not following a trend I read about. I’m making the drink of my childhood.
Here’s the part I care about most, and the part most shops skip. Before there were pearls, there was tea — and in my family, tea was serious business.
My grand-uncle farmed high mountain tea, the prized oolong grown up in the cool, misty altitudes where the leaves take their time and the flavour turns soft and floral.
That’s where my standards come from. Good bubble tea has nothing to do with the colour of the topping. It starts with tea that someone actually respected.
What “doing it properly” means to me
A lot of bubble tea in Australia is built from powder and syrup. You can taste the shortcut. I didn’t want to put my name on that.
So we brew our tea and watch the steep time the way my family watched theirs. We cook the tapioca fresh so it’s soft and chewy rather than the gluey, flavourless stuff you get when it’s been sitting in sugar syrup since morning. It’s slower and fussier. It’s also the whole point.
From a Taichung tea house to our Adelaide counter
Setting up Chewberry, I kept asking myself one question: would the version I’m serving here make my grand-uncle nod? That’s the bar. An authentic milk tea in Adelaide that tastes like the ones I grew up with, made with the same care, just a long way from home.
Some days I look at the line at the Central Market Plaza and I’m quietly amazed it worked.
Come taste a bit of my hometown
If the only bubble tea you’ve had came from a powder, I’d love to change your mind. Find us at the Central Market Plaza in Adelaide, order a brewed milk tea, and tell me if it tastes like more than a trend. It should taste like Taichung.
