Milk drinks
Hong Kong milk tea
Strong black tea pulled through a cloth bag and mixed with evaporated milk, served in the city's tea cafés.
Hong Kong milk tea is a blend of strong black teas brewed and poured repeatedly through a long cloth bag, then mixed with evaporated or condensed milk. The bag, stained brown with use, has given it the nickname silk stocking milk tea. It is smooth, strong and slightly bitter, and is served hot or iced in the cha chaan teng, the city's casual tea cafés.
What goes in
- Black tea blend323%, Several teas brewed strong.
- Water646%, Kept near the boil.
- Evaporated milk323%, Or condensed milk.
- Sugar18%, Added to taste.
Rough parts by weight. The ring shows each input's share of the product.
Made step by step
Each drawing shows the operation for that step. Quantities and timings differ from house to house and herd to herd; this is one traditional way, in outline.
Step 1: Boil Boil the tea leaves hard in a pot. Step 2: Strain Pour the tea through a cloth bag into another pot and back again several times. Step 3: Serve Pour evaporated milk into a heavy cup. Step 4: Serve Top with the hot tea and serve with sugar on the side. Finished Hong Kong milk tea, by share.
From the colonial tea table
British afternoon tea with fresh milk was out of reach for most people in colonial Hong Kong. Street stalls and later cafés made their own version with cheaper tea and tinned milk, which kept without refrigeration. By the middle of the twentieth century it had become the city's own drink. In 2014 the craft of making it was added to Hong Kong's first list of intangible cultural heritage.
Ways to order
Café talk has its own short forms. Yuenyeung mixes milk tea with coffee. Cha chow uses condensed milk in place of evaporated milk and sugar. Iced milk tea is often chilled with ice in a separate bath so it is not diluted. A good cup leaves a ring of cream on the side of the thick white cup.
Where it is used
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Sources and further reading
Original text and drawings by the EveryCow desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. The shares are a rough, illustrative ratio, not a recipe: every family and dairy makes it differently. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Holstein Friesian: Vista Alegre baserria, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Jersey: Man vyi, Public domain, source