Stay Inside and Make Some Boba

Since then, they’ve become a national phenomenon, with 17 locations in California and New York. And boba, more generally, has captured the imagination of everyone from Alexander Wang to Kacey Musgraves.

Though COVID-19 has devastated the restaurant trade, Chau and Chen have quickly pivoted their shops to delivery. Pickup and have taken to Instagram Live to help their friends and shoppers make their own boba tea at home. Luckily for all of us with those DIY aspirations (and a little extra time at home), they’ve in addition just released The Boba Book , full of recipes and revelations about their cult-hit drinks.

We caught up with them to find out what it takes to make a really good (and Instagrammable ) boba tea at home. A lot has changed at Boba Guys over the last two months, but it’s cool to see that your shops are back up and running.

Since people are stuck at home (with their stockpiles of oat milk), it’s kind of a perfect time to try out a DIY approach to boba. What’s the hardest thing to get right if you’re making boba tea at home?

If we do our job right in The Boba Book , we think making the actual drink itself is pretty easy. One of the key themes in the book is that the world of boba is responsible for a lot of the innovation in the beverage space, yet a lot of the credit goes to third wave coffee and trendy cocktail bars. People forget that the boba world is what made oat milk popular, jellies in beverages normal, and zany infusions of teas, fruits, and milks all the rage.

And how common (or uncommon) is it for boba shops to focus on carefully sourced or house-made components the way that you do? We do like to think we had something to do with it, as all the media coverage and “boba is normal” kicked off right when we were taking off.

If we were to analyze it a bit more, we think it has to do with an evolving American palate combined with brands like us getting better at storytelling and making our drink more accessible. Other than the Classic Milk Tea (the sector’s core drink . . . kinda like the vanilla ice cream of boba), people seem to really love the banana milk method.

What’s really cool is that we’ve of late seen some people take the original banana milk method and make it their own. We’ve been eating it for nearly a decade, as it’s popular in our circles.

We’ve been carrying it in our stores for a couple years now, trying to introduce it to the masses. In our stores, it was done for practical purposes: marmalades are shelf-stable, and we can make preserves with fruits that are out of season.

It’s funny you say that it’s the perfect book during this crisis, since it sure didn’t feel that way when we decided to delay our book tour back in February. The digital cookbook is going for $5.99, and all proceeds go to the Restaurant Workers’ COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund.