The Alley Peach Oolong Milk Tea Review

"The Alley" Milk Tea - Naichashike Peach Oolong Milk Tea

These 123g, larged sized 'instant' milk tea packs are hard to miss being quite bold and pretty standalone at Asian grocery stores. As a non-heavy bubble tea drinker (I drink it maybe 6-8 times a year), I did notice that the logo and packaging is very similar to The Alley Lujiaoxiang's packaging. Upon a little bit of research, it appears that The Alley does not produce this drink at all. 

I apologise, the printing of the ingredients and nutrition information is quite fuzzy in my zoomed photo. It's almost as if it says there is 0 sugar... WHAT? That can't be right.

It comes with everything you need (pictured above) to make the drink at home. Except the water of course!

I am unable to read Chinese but given that this comes with everything you need, winged this and felt it went fine.


Directions:

• Empty peach powder and beans into the cup - I left the brown sugar aside
• Put the oolong tea and some water into a cup - I microwaved this for 1 minute to extract the flavour better
• Mix the oolong tea into the cup and add extra water as desired
• Do a final microwave to dissolve anything not yet dissolved

I am drinking this as I blog.


Thoughts:

I honestly was not expecting to like the red beans as they're usually something that is too sweet but the small size of it made it not too sweet so I feel it's a nice thing which adds texture to the beverage.

The brown sugar is a nice addition for sugar-lovers out there but I feel the drink does perfectly fine and has its own flavour without the additional brown sugar added. It was quite annoying when I went to open the lid and given how full it is, the syrup just burst onto the table and droplets splattered. If it didn't come with brown sugar at all, I'd be fine.
The drink however, already seems to have sweetness in the peach powder so I cannot control the level of that sweetness (except by excluding the brown sugar syrup).

Sometimes with powdered drinks, I do worry the powder will not dissolve easily. This was not the case, it dissolved and mixed quite well uniformly without any chunky residue floating on the top. You can see in the picture above that it develops a nice little foamy layer at the top which is nice.

The ratio of powder and ingredients to water? Is about 2:5.

The flavour itself is certainly peachy - almost like a fragrance but not in an over-bearing way as the oolong balances it out a little bit. It gives a nice, smooth milky taste at first but then leaves a more fragrant floral-y milk taste after a bit.

I like how we get a large straw to get those beans. It gives that bubble tea feeling :).

Pricing and convenience:

Overall, I am quite impressed. I even let my older brother try this and he thought it taste quite good as well. 

I bought this for $2.85AUD whilst this size of drink at the shops is usually around $7AUD. Although you have to make it yourself and it does have a certain level of sweetness to the drink (so you can't opt for 0 sugar like at Chatime), I do think it is a fun idea and good option to keep in your snack cupboard so you don't have to worry about the drink tasting bad after a certain time (like how Gongcha recommends you to consume your drink within 24hrs is it? idk).

It's also something handy if you crave some bubble tea :)

Thanks for reading! Bye for now :)

Tina

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