[Music] Hello friends and welcome to another video this week I'm gonna be running a boba shop I can't explain why someone thought it would be a good idea to let me do that but it's too late now so if you don't know boba also called bubble tea or pearl milk tea is a general term that can refer to a wide variety of chunky drinks but in its most basic form is usually black tea milk ice and chewy tapioca pearls or boba originally from Taiwan bubble tea with its wide variety of flavors colors additives and toppings has kind of taken the world by storm with boba tea cafes popping up all over the globe
and boba culture or fandom expanding to merch plushies mini-fridges cosplays lotion and aesthetic tea making content across digital media platforms now I've been a huge fan of boba for years I can't officially remember the first time I had it oh my god I choked on something but it's always been a sweet indulgence that Tyler and I like to get and occasionally pour on plastic pants however even though I have visited many boba shops and consumed a lot of bubble tea in my life I don't have a lot of experience making it so when the opportunity came up for us to run a boba shop for a day I thought now this could be interesting now let's rewind to a couple of months ago back in July we got a cold email to our business inbox from a viewer Megan who works at the kung fu tea shop in Charlottesville Virginia she mentioned that their shop had had a pretty tough year because of covid and asked if we would be
interested in collaborating and I said okay this is a crazy idea but can we run your store for a day and she said sure so here we are heading to Charlottesville to learn about what goes on behind the scenes of a boba shop and then doing a full boba store takeover where we design a custom drink menu and make and serve people some drinks now two quick disclaimers here one this video is not sponsored and we didn't get paid anything by the boba shop to make it or for the drinks that we sold there we're just in it for the content people and two kung fu tea is part of a larger chain but each individual location is its own franchise so though it's not necessarily like a mom and pop shop the Charlottesville store does operate as its own business and I figured that in order to not just ruin their boba shop for a day I should
probably train a little bit beforehand so we decided to spend two days there the first of which would entail Megan teaching me the ropes and then the second which would be the day that we actually did the thing so we drove up to Charlottesville which is notable for being like a cute college town home to the University of Virginia that's our spot baby and we got to the store a couple of hours before it opened on day one all right so we are here for day one of my boba shop running experience I am not currently in front of kung fu tea I am in the alleyway next to the pizza hut next to the kung fu tea just because the front of the store is in like full sun right now and that was intense but we're here and we're ready to make some tea and after checking in with Megan this is Megan everyone says hi to Megan
she suited me up I doth you a worker for today thank you I have been knighted fearless innovation kung fu tea it's the garyvee of hats and quickly put me to work in the back so you can put aprons on or else it might get a little bit sticky the first thing that I needed to learn and also the first thing that Megan does when she comes into work in the morning is to prepare the actual tea that's hot water as well as the additives that go into the tea like the tapioca pearls the pudding the cheese foam etc but we went for the tea first so I can make the black tea and then you can make the rest of the teas so I'll just show you how to do this and the process is basically just like steeping loose
tea leaves but everything is giant it's like a squat workout because you really got to get on the floor with this stuff like the pot of water is giant and you use a lot of tea leaves am I being trusted alone for scale all right let's do it here we go it smells actually amazing and it takes a little longer to steep I'm just going to pour this in and if you can use the paddle and just mush the tea down so everything is soaked mmm hot leaf juice kung fu tea has four different varieties of tea water lots of water on watts blast besides the black tea they have green tea oolong tea and thai tea all right so tea in and then smash it down not all of their drinks use tea some of them are kind of like tricked out iced fruit juices but the drinks that do use one of these for that one's give me some strong nest quick vibes and you
essentially use the same process to prepare all of the teas booms with just slightly different measurements stewing temperatures and steeping times soft when it comes to this you have a choice you can either be iro or zuko i think I'm the guy who was fired before they showed up okay got it and once all the teas are steeped it's time for the giant filter bags we have a filtering bag for each tea so it's the same order black green oolong thai you know to sieve out all the leaves this is the part that can kind of scare people great because this is pretty hot but you just kind of gotta commit whoa yeah that's some tea and then we just let that drip out for a few minutes all right so yeah my friends go to the gym I just I come here oh oh this one's
heavy hey canister and okay there are some leaves at the bottom is that okay that's fine it's fine fun fact apparently Megan's boss used to collect these used tea leaves and then bathe in them spa theme park style we save every last drop here but with everything poured and filtered it was time to ice the drinks more Megan says more I must deliver more and once our teas had been chilled you can see like even all that ice that we put already melted I know ty look we poured them into their giant coolers and put them out in the front of the store to use those are the teas we made black tea green tea oolong tea thai tea and I didn't make the water but I feel like i
contributed somehow and then we moved on to the toppings now as i mentioned before in the full pantheon of bubble tea there are a lot of different additives that can be used from different kinds of bobas to syrups puddings and jellies oh my and I was gonna learn how to make a couple of different ones today now the traditional boba is a ball of tapioca starch that's essentially marinated inside a big vat of caramelized sugar syrup until it becomes a bouncy chewy brown pearl they look like cocoa puffs oh yeah kung fu tea gets like a dried variety that has been pre-steeped that you just have to separate the dangerous thing here though is if you just kind of bang it down all of these will shatter and you'll get powder oh so you kind of gotta be gentle and you just kind of like hug it like I don't know you're
cuddling a baby if you want to try it smells weirdly comforting it smells like a bath and the body works I'm not kidding and then boil to activate them to network baby food network and these take about an hour of boiling stirring and more stirring if you go just in a circle like this it's going to make like a tornado right yeah so it's going to make one giant boba ball in the middle instead of doing that you want to make like a figure eight so it kind of breaks it up in there double i'm boiling some bubbles to reach that ideal bouncy firm texture being tired over there stuff yeah I'm just writing my own name I'm marking it with s for Sofia like z for zorro but not in Taiwan this
texture is called q commonly found in foods like fish balls and noodles it roughly translates to chewy definitely firm but not mushy and sort of like how al dente is prized in italy hugh is like a really desirable texture in taiwanese foods i thought the sound of the sink was the boba and i had done something catastrophically wrong this is erupting it's krakabova yeah and though there are rival origin stories of the boba milk tea which emerged sometime in the 1980s this is where more of this action comes in whoa most people agree that the name boba originates from actress amy yip's famous
chesticles how do we feel about like alternating figure eights and then once you have your tapioca cooked cooled and bouncy watch yourself there's a boba overboard over here no boba down you soak them in the appropriate syrup this batch of boba we actually split in half with half becoming regular honey boba and then we just mush it around to make sure everything is nice and covered and gonna get that nice honey flavor and the other half becoming brown sugar boba so this one is more intensive because you have to stir it for 20
minutes straight oh wow okay yeah all right 20 minutes straight this is a great way to get you out of the way stop go sit in the corner for 20 minutes by yourself now brown sugar bubble tea is actually a really popular flavor slash trend and it essentially entails coating the sides of your boba cup with brown sugar syrup to create kind of like a tiger stripe effect so kung fu tea makes a brown sugar tapioca pearl to match it i've been doing this for six minutes somehow that feels like a lifetime and i passed my 20 minutes by annoying the bejesus out of megan dear reginald i have been stirring these bobas for eight
minutes general megan has added more water to the bowl to prevent the bobas from sticking to the bottom this has provided temporary respite and yet i miss you how's the palm as well as reveling in my future ripped forearms i mean you'll have massive wrists by the end of this that's the one muscle i have yeah literally just a re
ally really really muscular right wrist don't talk to me or my wrist ever again there's nothing wrong with my wrist what do you mean and making some obscure cooking show references i think you can use a little bit more olive oil sauce oh just a tad olive oil just a little bit of olive oil we didn't add any olive oil sorry megan was like what no until
eventually we were done that's gonna coat all of the cups and gonna give it like that tiger stripe look yeah okay that was hard those dastardly balls so besides those two tapioca pearl varieties we also made some pudding this recipe calls for lactate milk tyler that stuff steals my soul man you and me baby yeah this is where it's at and some secret pudding powder do i have a secret formula for the krabby patty in my hands yeah does kung fu tea have a plankton equivalent that's the pizza hut next door oh yeah the pizza is the chum bucket and if you've never had it before it's sort of like a firm plain sweet custard oh it smells so good and it's actually my favorite boba topping so you know shots fired can't waste a drop so having learned how to make all of the basic teas and some of the toppings
so our fridge is completely stocked for tomorrow woohoo it was now time for megan to teach me how to make some actual drinks this is like the drink making station i think this is the shaking station and then that's like the sealer oh yeah as i mentioned before we had with megan's help crafted a custom drink menu for our boba store takeover and i needed to at least know how to make all of our eight signature drinks starting with bat to the bone which is a sesame oolong milk tea with a double serving of pudding well that's about how much pudding you want in there that's a fair amount of pudding yeah that's a serious bit of pudding now that's what i call pudding and the way you make it is you take one of these mixing tumblers and put in a dollop of cane sugar so this is our cane sugar machine okay 0.5 a bit of sesame syrup some milk powder you're going to take two
flat scoops of it and put it in there some ice and some oolong tea and then you stick your mixture in this amazing shaker machine all right tai this is the money step [Applause] that's the best ever and then once it's all shook up you strain the drink into your boba cup adding a little bit of ice back in and then use the sealer machine to finish it off batch to the bone what do you think it looks pretty cool and here is a quick taste test of me trying out our drinks in the back of our subaru that's really good how did it spill on me so fast how did that happen so quickly it's kind of like um like a slight grain to it with the sesame it kind of also um weirdly feels comforting like a baby formula and i'm a big pudding fan so i really like the pudding in here
next up on our menu we have frankin frankenmatcha which is a sesame matcha drink with boba pearls and cheese foam or milk cap on top now we haven't really talked about cheese foam yet but it's basically a mixture of whipped cream milk and cream cheese oh yeah and it has kind of like a mild non-sweet cheesecakey taste that rocks it rose to popularity with the cheese tea trend over the past few years and i think now has been incorporated as a pretty common milk tea topping in many boba shops i'm ready for cheese i'm ready for the cheese megan also got us this super cute stencil from michaels for this one classic martha martha stewart so we could add like a custom matcha powder topping wait that's not bad that's kind of cute and here is the taste test this one also has like a sesame taste but like a serious earthy matcha taste as well the bobas at the bottom are
actually quite sweet in comparison and then here's um here's a taste of the cheese topping oh i like that i like how the cheese interacts with like the sesame seeds because i think there are like whole sesame seeds in there then our next drink up is the cheese theme park named after our trip to the imsho cheese theme park in south korea which is a plain oolong tea with brown sugar bobas and you guessed it cheese foam on top this one is my favorite which is also why i put it on there megan recommended megan approved oh yeah that's really good it's kind of just a plain oolong tea but that interacts very well with like the brown sugar boba at the bottom and the cheese at the top it's sort of like setting the scene of the cheese
theme park the rolling hills exactly and then the cheese just comes in as like the roller coaster on top yeah then next up we have cheyenne hall which is sort of like a milk and black tea layered ombre drink with boba pearls so this one does not actually include shaking but it is very aesthetic great and you achieve this effect by filling your cup with milk creating a barrier line of ice and then slowly pouring the tea over it a lot of milk and black tea which is very good together can't find fault in that it's a pretty tried and true combo then next up we have been there worn bat which is an iced matcha drink with matcha powder milk powder cane sugar ice and water so this is a little bit different because it's a slush so we're not shaking it we're blending it got it and once it's blended it's poured over some red beans it's
very good it's offsetting some of the sweeter drinks that came before very earthy yeah the red beans gonna do that to you yeah totally because it's matcha and red bean so it's like double earth I think this is a good palette cleanser in case you wanted to drink all eight drinks in a row the collector's edition exactly and then next up we have oreo subscribed oh I'm definitely which is a deceptively simple tea free combo of brown sugar bubbles slash syrup make sure you go all the way to the top ah I'm-p\ scared oh my god they're gonna fly out oreo crumbles or you subscribed that's a lot of oreo actually ice and lactate just all the way to the top this is basically milk and cookies
and tapioca it's barely street-legal it's a dunkaroo in a cup oh my god that's so good I don't think this is street legal this is just like literally soggy cookies and milk oh my god am I allowed to drink this then next up we have barry I and boba which as the name implies includes a lot of boba we are doing two scoops of toppings which is why it is burying you in boba yeah regular and crystal to be specific I brought you a gift it's a crystal nothing more as well as rosehip powder ooh look when it hits the sugar down there I love that I want to wear this powder like a sock and lemon juice and this one gets its name from our mega Franken for a lipstick color Berryman lipsticks oh yeah beautiful that does look like Franken for an oh wow that was a blast of flavor I don't know if it was every flavor at Sephora
but it's a lot of flavors it's very sweet but the lemon offsets it because it's kind of like a sort of a raspberry lemonade plus boba action and then finally the last drink on our custom menu is longan for the nineties cause um we use longan honey in all of our honey drinks and this drink is a mixture of honey and green tea on top of some mango jelly this one's very good the like body of the tea is a little bit sweet because there's a fair amount of honey in it but it's not overly sweet it's still got some like herbiness to it it could still LARP his tea yeah it's still sort of tea yeah it's not just soggy cookies and milk all right so that is our menu and that is a wrap on day one we prepped a lot of jellies and puddings and teas and I think I learned how to make all of these drinks I'm creating an army did I retain any of that
the knowledge I don't know we're gonna find out tomorrow but for now, I need to go lie down all right so we're here outside of kung fu tea on day two of boba shop running so for day two I let you guys know via instagram story that we were gonna be at kung fu tv and to come by if you were interested just so I could actually make our drinks for some of you all though, to be honest, I was pretty nervous that no one was gonna come I think megan had also done some list serve emailing at the nearby university of virginia which she goes to so it's fine so today I'm gonna be like doing some real stuff if I get really bad I'll just be relegated to just adding toppings into the boba cups but I'm gonna try and do good and make some good drinks we'll see how it goes I'm also gonna put a gopro on so you know just in case it gets too crazy for me to express anything well at least be able to see how my hands were feeling I'm gonna like walk around like
this so it looks like a video game character yeah now I'm not gonna lie I was actually super nervous when the store first opened I don't remember anything from yesterday it's where am I sorry I just blacked back in what was the question because it seemed like a lot of people ended up showing up I'm scared me too hello hi hi guys, hello hello I have no idea what I'm doing oh no and despite my training, I was still pretty green to the milk tea mixologist gig okay now I start making it great I'm sorry if I'm slow so franken matcha is two scoops, ah it's happening all right here we go one two and as part of my running of the shop I was gonna cycle through all of the different stations if you will from drink making 200 cc's I'm trying to play to the gopro it's medium successful to running the cash register to calling out orders and our selling hours were gonna be noon to 8 p.m so I had eight hours to prove my worth as a tea maker boom first drink of the day sir
now just to be clear there were a lot of other kung fu tea staff members there to support our insanity okay here's what is it frank and matcha here you go thank you so much of course thanks for coming uh dude this is hard and also to help make sure that we didn't end up with a big backup of drinks all right there we go okay oh wow there are a lot of people here this is an oreo subscribed so though I still think that we were participating in running the store I'm ready for my next assignment all right we certainly weren't doing it alone huh how you feeling okay all right cool and from the get-go, Megan helped me out with reminding me all of the steps to make
each of our drinks oolong tea up to were about where your thumb is my thumb yeah like that Megan a little bit more yeah that's good and you can shake it as I think most of the instructions sort of flew out of my head the green button I like how Megan has to remind me what button it is the green one but what about this big red button just a self-destruct button for all of kung fu teeth I would say I got off to a pretty rocky start making drinks oh my god as I was certainly not that fast at it this is lemon right yeah okay and I did occasionally have to stop my drink-making cycle to say hi to some of you guys who came by the shop I know you're not here for my boba making skills I get it no one's noticed but I'm not working
yet, of course, thanks for watching guys nice to meet you you're gonna get fired for slacking I'm literally about to get fired and there were also some larger hiccups like when I accidentally spilled a bat to the bone all over myself okay all right you're back in all right let's try this again and also my first few attempts at using our powder stencil was a complete bust oh no well there's a move all right we'll try it again later like Gordon says what are you a matcha sandwich I think I was folding under the pressure oh dude it's me I don't know what I'm doing wrong as Megan seemed to be able to do it fine stop look at Megan's oh my god why is it beautiful I give up I quit sorry that
was I bought my last boba I'm over it though I did slowly get more into the rhythm of making our drinks back to the bone we meet again redemption having to rely on Megan and the cheat sheet a little less each time yes to the point where Megan could actually be doing another task and leave me unsupervised making drinks on my own mostly unsupervised software really unsupervised stop is flying solo just rolling with the homies what do we think looks okay good to me great now besides my slowly increasing boba slinging skills technique is down yeah she's been training all day yesterday for this that's not just tractor yeah there's still time to mess it up okay literally there's still time there were a lot of things that happened throughout the day oh yeah dude this one looks sick first off you guys really showed up for our boba menu I have a very me and boba for 67?
A back to the bone for 68 which was awesome but also very intimidating as the restaurant was pretty packed for most of the day damn dude it's a big wine and though I felt like we were getting a lot of drinks out the door or across the counter I have a chai on the hall for number 49. the line kept respawning every few minutes it never stops never hi but it was really nice to finally get to see a lot of you guys in person Catherine nice to meet you guys hi hi it's so nice to meet you yeah nice to meet you too hello because it's been such a long time thank you, of course, thanks for watching guys thanks for watching I feel like I'm at like a farm door I'm like hello sorry if i smell I feel like I smell and there were even a few of you who brought us some
presents oh that's awesome is that boba yeah for sure oh yeah it's very me and boba like Brooke who brought us gifts from somewhat nearby colonial Williamsburg look at this yeah I forget oh yeah I'll take that, yeah oh my god this is so epic and I know you guys like candles oh this is amazing thank you so much we also got some interesting requests can you sign some ducks for me some ducks okay sure I'll sign some ducks and some of you guys also exhibited some fratty behavior wait don't shock that without us what can I say apparently uva goes hard nice that was pretty good that was good actually I really like that sorry pizza hut the one consequence of the restaurant being packed was that we started running out of stuff notably the all-important lactate no milk mayday back there
okay great sorry we literally just ran out of milk so Megan really called in the cavalry sending both the legion of her friends to the store as well as ordering a grocery delivery, oh yes so much thank you oh my lord which resulted in us ending up with a crap ton of lactate fermi and boba more like bury me and lactate bury me in lactate people with both the grocery milk and the friend milk coming through hello I have your milk no I've literally never had more milk in my life look at these jugs I suppose more lactate is always better than none Megan runs on lactate alone now as I mentioned a bit earlier I had wanted to rotate through the different stations behind the counter hello hi what would you like medium oreo and one part that I found myself to be just straight up no good at was the pos system your total is five dollars and 29 cents to be fair I had
never really been trained on it I'll click this and then that looks like a credit card so I'll click this great but to be unfair I couldn't seem to get the hang of it even after doing it for a while literally so underqualified for this like can you push buttons no the answer is objectively no so I kept going back to making drinks boom as I was getting faster at it oh my god you're good to keep going that looks pretty good and I was able to eventually get into a groove with our stencil too oh finally victory is mine which was pretty satisfying oh that one was good too I love it hey that's two successful uh dustings in a row how you feeling I feel power endless power I don't like this look in your eye calling out the drinks was also pretty easy as it's basically just yelling i have a bat to the bone for number 12.
But one thing i was pretty happy about was that all of the drinks on our menu did get ordered at least once i have a longing for the 90s for number 94 champion hall for number 36. and have been there worn that for number 13. some were more popular than others like the berry me and boba which I think was probably number one i have a bury me and boba for number 26. also a Berryman boba for number 27. and some people even developed their own iterations of the bib there are no bubbas in there did you order with no bulbous i bury me and nothing a bury me and nothing that's what it is someone asked for beans in their berry mean boba this is berry me and beans though i would say the oreo subscribed was a close second favorite as we did have to re-smash even more Oreos later on in the day to keep up with demand let's just flash that like and subscribe button on the screen right now and i feel like that's vaguely threatening but i like it yes subscribe or else and there were a fair amount of Franken matchas and cheese theme parks ordered as well now after quite a few hours of this matrix-matrix lean we finally reached 6 p.m which
was the first time all day that we had a little ebb in the crowd we just knocked out all the drinks so we're just waiting we're chilling okay perfect and from then on it was kind of a sprint to the finish line it got really crowded again getting through a couple of last waves of customers remember when we ordered every lactate from a single grocery store that was fun it was like a Mr beast video but it was just lactate before 8 pm when we could finally shut our doors we're closed so that was our day running a boba shop, in general, it was a pretty wild ride and though I wouldn't say I have a natural talent for
beau barista ing no yes yes, of course, you can have a straw see I'm so fired I did get better and fast and at the end of the day megan even said that she would hire me full time I think you can you can do an okay now at least megan isn't saying you're fired yeah here maybe leave briefly before I fire you though she did lose her voice from having to yell instructions at me for two days straight I just regret talking so much yesterday megan taught us everything so now she can't speak anymore rip megan we hardly knew ye overall it was really cool to actually learn how boba gets made on a large scale and now I'm feeling some inclinations to experiment with bubble tea making on my own like making custom bat-shaped pearls or
something and I am very enamored with the boba making equipment, especially the shaker machine why do I want one of these just get one I don't even know what I would do with it we'll figure it out later so let's all brainstorm some future video ideas so I can justify buying one for our office to thank you guys so much for watching thank you to Megan for inviting us and thanks to everyone who came to see us at kung fu tea also a portion of this video was premiered during the streams so thank you so much to the streams for featuring us if you liked that video make sure to smash that like button and if you want to see more videos like this make sure to smash that subscribe button oreo subscribed goodbye oreo subscribed here is my Instagram here is my tik tok here is my youtube shorts channel and here is our live streaming channel also here's our merch website in case you are interested in wearing a shirt like this and other items and with that, I will see you guys the next time
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