Tea and Milk Tea

Ideal tea brewing temperatures

• Oolong tea: ~95-100°C
• Black tea: ~90°C
• Green tea: ~80°C
  • Exception to Gyokuro, whose ideal brewing temperature is about 50-60°C.

SEA-style milk tea

The most well-known TEA we have here is Teh Tarik, which is basically black tea with sweetened condensed milk. This is my favourite style of tea, though I usually prefer a mixture of unsweetened evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk.

In Singpaore and Malaysia, the tea is usually brewed with the use of black tea dust from BOH Tea or Lipton, though my favourite blend of tea dust is Ipoh Chang Jiang Serbuk Teh.

Do take note to make the tea extra gao (concentrated) to balance out the water content from the milk, or else the milk tea will end up tasting bland. If using tea dust, 8-10g of tea dust, with 240ml of water at 90°C, is sufficient for one cup of gao tea to make milk tea.

I had tried experimenting making SEA-style milk tea with using other kinds of tea:

• ChaTraMue Original Tea Mix: Considering Thai Milk Tea is mainly made from this with condensed milk, this is definitely a match in heaven.
  • Goes without saying, ChaTraMue's Green Tea mix also works well.
• No.18 Black tea from Taiwan: Considering it is also black tea, it's not bad.
• Green tea from Taiwan: Awful, using creamer or frothed full-cream milk may be better.
• Taiwan High Mountain Oolong Tea: Great with unsweetened evaporated milk instead of condensed milk.

Matcha latte

Made from whisking matcha powder in small amounts of water, then mixed with foamed hot milk. My rough measurements for a perfect cup of matcha latte:

• 3 chashaku scoops of matcha powder whisked with 40ml of 80°C~85°C water.
• 120ml of milk, thrown to a 500w microwave for 1.5 minutes before foaming.
• A little sugar (i.e. 1 teaspoonful) to balance out the grassy flavours. w