What is Boba Tea?

Boba tea is a Taiwanese drink made from tea, milk or fruit juice, and chewy tapioca pearls, typically served cold over ice with a wide straw to pull up the pearls. The pearls are made from cassava starch cooked until soft and slightly bouncy.

Also called bubble tea. The "bubble" refers to the foam created by shaking the drink, not the pearls, though most people now associate it with the pearls.

Taipei, Taiwan has 2,406 specialty coffee shops. Boba shops are a separate category entirely and there are far more of them.

Taiwan is where boba originated in the early 1980s. The drink spread across Asia, then to North America, Europe, and Australia over the following decades. In the US, boba shops proliferated dramatically in the 2010s and are now found in virtually every major city.

"Boba tea is now a $3 billion industry in the US alone. It started in one tea shop in Taichung, Taiwan in the early 1980s."

The main types of boba

Milk tea boba: Black or green tea with milk and tapioca pearls. The classic. Usually sweetened with brown sugar or simple syrup.
Fruit tea boba: Fruit juice or fresh fruit blended with tea and pearls. Lighter and less creamy than milk tea.
Matcha boba: Matcha with milk and pearls. Earthy and popular at shops in Los Angeles and New York.
Taro boba: Purple taro root gives the milk a slightly nutty, sweet flavor and a distinctive purple color.

How to order boba for the first time

Choose your tea base (black, green, oolong, or matcha). Choose your sweetness level (usually 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%). Choose your ice level. Choose your topping (classic tapioca pearls, popping pearls, jelly, or pudding). The shop will shake it and hand it over with a wide straw. Find boba shops listed in the Pulled Coffee database in Chicago and other cities, tracked alongside traditional coffee shops as part of our 462,531-shop database.

Related: What is a chai latte?, Matcha latte vs coffee, What to order if you do not like coffee.