Bobba

One of the blessings and curses of being head of R&D for a tea company is that frequently when coworkers come across tea related products they haven’t seen before they will buy them for me and leave them on my desk. The only reason it’s a “curse” is because quite often they’re products I’ve seen/tried before, like in this case, but generally it’s still always a very sweet and thoughtful surprise.

Trying this the second time around, I like it just about the same as the first time. I thought it was maybe a little less lemony, but overall the sweetness level was still good and I still really like that it’s an interpretation of dragonfruit as a flavour that’s much less fruit punch-like than most commercial dragonfruit products.

Last time I tried one of these bubble tea RTDs I found it wayyyy too sweet tasting, but I saw that they’re recently put out some new flavous and this one sounded really, really good so I decided against my better judgement to try it anyway. Honestly, still very sweet but notably less so than past ones I’ve tried. I can’t help but wonder if that’s a reaction to people finding their initial line up too sweet or, maybe, it’s because this flavour is white tea based which is a more gentle/subtle tea base and commercially speaking bottled white teas RTDs tend to often be lighter in flavour/sweetness than other products in the same line…

Regardless, I thought the dragonfruit was really nice and it was just lemony enough to convey lemonade without needing to be super zingy and intense. Dragonfruit is often interpreted in the food/beverage space (with RTD, candy, etc) as a bit “fruit punch” like but I didn’t actually feel like this fell into that trap too much. Overall pretty refreshing, and I think well matched with my expectations for this flavour profle.

If I had to choose a favourite of the three RTD from Bobba that I tried, it would be this one – but by a slim margin. All of them were bad and used a ridiculous and unrestrained amount of both Splenda and stevia as sweetener. However, this one at least seemed to have a little acidity to it to balance it slightly and the sugary watermelon at least reminded me of like a watermelon Jolly Rancher candy versus some kind of sweet/syrupy grocery aisle pantry item.

Like the other drinks from this RTD brand, this was a simply ungodly level of sweetness. Way sweeter than should be allowed in a bottled drink. It tasted almost exactly like the cocktail syrup in a can of sweetened Dole peach slices. It was definitely weird and my least favourite of the three flavours we tried…

One of my favourite things about working with a bunch of tea nerds is that whenever one of us finds a new tea RTD we tend to buy it to bring into the office and share. In this case, it was a series of “bubble tea inspired” tea/fruit juice RTD with a bunch of popping boba in the bottom of the glass bottle…

First, let me just start by saying that I fucking love popping boba. I prefer them to tapioca when I’m ordering bubble tea, and I am hard pressed to find a usage of them that I dislike. However, These RTDs were a lot. Simple enough in concept; each has a popping boba that matches the flavour of the tea/fruit juice base. In this case, strawberry. They’re just an UNGODLY level of sweet though! In addition to other sweetening agents, the drinks all use splenda and stevia and it’s… wow.

This one was the thickest of the three, with a liquor that was almost like someone had just thinned out Smucker’s strawberry jam. That was maybe the most surprising thing other than the sweetness; how much this was a cooked strawberry note and not a fresh or even necessarily candy style strawberry. Just, so much like jam…