A Sneak Peek At Taiwanese Bubble Tea Chain Milksha’s First S’pore Outlet At Suntec City

How Milksha came to be is a pretty cute story. It was founded in 2004 by its Taiwanese owner, Kevin Lin, a dairy farmer who owns a farm producing cow’s milk. When his farm was struggling with poor business, Kevin came up with the idea to open a bubble tea shop using milk from the farm. Milksha’s current outlets in Taiwan still uses milk from Kevin’s farm, though not in Singapore due to supply restrictions. Fresh milk from Indonesia-based milk supplier Greenfields is swapped in instead. According to Milksha’s PR rep, this brand of fresh milk apparently “tastes the closest to the milk used in Taiwan”.

We admit we haven’t heard of Milksha before it arrived on our shores, but it’s apparently a big deal in Taiwan. It was voted the number one bubble tea brand in Taiwan by Taiwanese university students (who might possibly be the most ferocious bubble tea drinkers in the world, considering the drink originated from Taiwan) in a poll run by popular Taiwanese news website PopDaily. 8days.sg had a sneak preview of the Suntec City outlet ahead of its opening date, and tell you what’s good to order there.

Milksha takes over a spacious unit formerly occupied by fellow Taiwanese bubble tea chain Bobii Frutii (co-owned by actor Nat Ho). The stylishly sparse takeaway space is adorned with Milksha’s snazzy cow logo, and offers a waiting area for customers to hang around till their orders are ready, or drink their bubble tea on the spot. Instead of seats, there are wide railings for you to sorta rest your derrière on.

There are four drinks series served here: the Fresh Milk series has an all-the-rage Brown Sugar Milk with honey-infused pearls, while the Special Concoctions range has four types of refreshing citrus iced teas. The Fresh Milk Tea Latte series offers milk-based teas like Earl Grey Latte, and the Premium Tea series serves teas like green tea and oolong sans milk.

You can add extra toppings like pearls, grass jelly and pudding ($1 per topping) to selected drinks. But unlike other bubble tea chains which boast a myriad of pearl flavours like the ubiquitous brown sugar, there’s only Milksha’s signature Honey Pearls available here. The tapioca pearls are made in Milksha’s own factory in Tainan, flown over, and cooked for an hour in honey till the translucent pearls turn golden. A fresh batch of pearls is made every two hours or so.

Instead of the full-on earthiness of brown sugar, our first few sips of this drink is spiked with the fragrant floral sweetness of honey pearls. It’s a refreshing change from the usual brown sugar pearl milk with brown sugar pearls that’s now sold everywhere. The fresh milk is nicely creamy and thick, but we’d prefer more brown sugar syrup in our cup. We can barely taste it, since the honey pearls overpower our drink’s too-mild brown sugar flavour. However, milk and honey is a classic combo. Milksha’s pearls here are pretty fab, cooked to an al dente, chewy finish. It’s also sweeter than the average plain tapioca pearls and even brown sugar pearls, so you might want to order a lower sugar level than usual for your drink if it contains these babies. But if we had to choose: we still prefer the smoky, caramelised flavour of brown sugar pearls.

If you’re hoping for an Instagrammable Thanos-purple taro milk drink, this is not it. Our cup is an almost uniform milk-white colour. But what it lacks in Insta-worthiness, it makes up for with taste.

Taro (which interestingly, is often mistakenly called yam in our part of the world — both taste similar but come from different species of plants) from the Dajia District in Taichung, Taiwan, famous for its taro farming, is peeled, cubed and frozen before being airflown to Singapore. Why not do it here, we wonder. According to Milksha’s PR rep, the company’s production factory in Tainan does most of the prepping of raw ingredients for convenience before sending them to their various outlets for further processing. The frozen taro is then boiled here in the shop and mashed by hand till it becomes a coarse orh ni-like paste, and added to fresh milk for the Fresh Taro Milk drink. It’s a yummy pick; like slurping up a good lemak, yam-like, smoothie. It’s also very filling, so don’t order this just before dinner.

We don’t usually like matcha, but the delicate, mildly bitter matcha flavour in this is lovely with milk. Milksha uses matcha powder from century-old Japanese tea purveyor Tousuien, and sweet Taiwanese adzuki beans that have been cooked down till it’s soft to the bite. Refreshing on a hot day and not jelak, even though it’s a milky drink.

The juice from Taiwanese oranges are squeezed and packed into bottles at Milksha’s Taiwanese HQ before being sent to Singapore. Our drink packs an elegant bittersweet hint similar to mandarin oranges, but we couldn’t tell there’s green tea in this at all. Not terribly exciting, compared to the other fancier, tastier drinks (see above).

Sri Lankan Earl Grey milk tea and honey pearls is a crowd-pleasing combination, but the bergamot flavour for this could be stronger.

Think of this as an atas Milo drink, except it’s made with Valrhona cocoa powder and fresh full-cream milk. We expected a satisfyingly intense iced chocolate drink, so it’s a pity when our order comes with just a lacklustre hint of cocoa, despite the staff making us a second fresh cup with more cocoa powder in it.

If you like black sesame, this unusual concoction is actually decent. Gritty, fragrant house-made black sesame paste (it kinda reminds us of eating a black sesame tang yuan) is dropped into fresh milk to create a moody-looking grey-black drink that’s super filling and will appeal to even the most hardcore goths.

Milksha’s drinks aren’t radically different from its competitors, though the honey pearls here are one of the better versions we’ve tasted from a bubble tea chain so far (other Taiwanese bubble tea brands with local outlets like Hollin and Winnie’s offer honey pearls too). But the pearl-less drinks here are still worth a slurp, especially the creamy Taro Fresh Milk and Adzuki Matcha Milk. The brand is also opening a second outlet, housed in a mobile food truck, at the new Funan mall on June 28.

Milksha opens June 22 (Sat), 11am, at #02-375/376 Suntec City Tower 3, S038983 (above Uniqlo). Open daily 11am-10pm. www.facebook.com/milkshasingapore

PHOTOS: Mark Lee