Taste of Singapore comes to Colchester as bubble tea bar opens up
By: Jamie Milleare
A TASTE of Asia has come to Colchester after a tea bar with a twist opened in the town centre.
Bubble T Bar has opened in the former Levi’s Denim City shop, in Eld Lane, selling fruit and milk tea with flavoured bubbles and chewy tapioca balls.
The venture is the brainchild of Jamie Milleare, who also owns Darcy’s Sweet Shop just four doors away, after he went on holiday to Singapore.
He said: “It’s something nobody else is doing in the town.
“Last year I visited Singapore and I was going through the shops and wondering why there were queues of people.
“I went up to one of the shops and saw it was called bubble tea.
“I ordered an original one and thought it was the most unusual thing I have ever tasted.”
Jamie, 31, spent the next year securing enough money to open his own tea bar, finally succeeding this month.
Bubble tea hails from Eighties Taiwan. It was an evolution from the country’s street tea vendors who began experimenting with fruity flavours and colour to entice customers The UK’s first bubble tea shop in Soho, London, in 2011.
Bubble tea is often brightly coloured, sometimes served with milk, with a layer of jelly-like balls of tapioca, a starch extracted from cassava root, that settle at the bottom of the cup.
Customers order what flavours they want to combine before they are shaken up with tapioca balls to create the flavoured bubbles.
It makes bubble tea part drink and part snack.
Jamie, from Colchester, said: “At the moment we are only offering simple flavours as we don’t want to confuse people, although we do have this one ingredient called taro, which makes your drink purple.
“In the future I’d like to offer Oreo tea and cinnamon teas in the winter. I’d like this shop to be the first of many.”
Bubble Tea: WWW.BUBBLETEA.INFO