Yuenyeung: How to Make Hong Kong’s Coffee and Milk Tea

Yuenyeung is Hong Kong's coffee-and-tea drink: coffee mixed with Hong Kong-style milk tea — strong black tea with evaporated milk — and sugar, served hot or iced. To make one, brew 6 g of strong black tea in 200 ml of just-boiled water for about ten minutes, strain it, stir 125 ml of it with 50 ml of evaporated milk and sugar to taste, and add 75 ml of strong coffee: three parts coffee to seven parts milk tea.

It belongs to the cha chaan teng, Hong Kong's no-frills tea cafés. As the South China Morning Post has noted, nearly every one of them serves it, though it is mostly not on the menu.

The recipe

1. Brew the tea strong. Pour the just-boiled water over the tea in a small pan and keep it hot, just below a simmer, for about ten minutes.
2. Strain it through a fine cloth, a tea sock or a fine sieve, pouring it back through two or three times.
3. Make the milk tea. Pour 125 ml of the tea into a cup and stir in the evaporated milk and sugar.
4. Add the coffee and stir. Taste, and adjust with a little more coffee or milk.
5. For iced yuenyeung, chill the cup in a bowl of ice, or pour the drink over ice.

Three parts coffee, seven parts tea

The proportion most often given, including by the South China Morning Post, is three parts coffee to seven parts milk tea, though it varies with the tea and coffee a café uses. With more than twice as much milk tea as coffee, the drink is closer to milk tea with a coffee accent than to coffee with tea in it. The paper describes a good cup as having the smooth, silky texture and bold flavour of milk tea, with the coffee's aroma coming through subtly; Hong Kong's Leisure and Cultural Services Department put it the same way in 2003 — the smoothness comes from the milk tea, the rich flavour from the coffee.

That makes the milk tea the part to get right.

The milk tea underneath

Hong Kong-style milk tea grew out of British afternoon tea, which in colonial Hong Kong was served mainly in hotels and expensive Western restaurants. Local cafés — bing sutt and open-air dai pai dong — made an affordable version suited to local tastes, and swapped fresh milk for evaporated milk, which was cheaper, easier to store and more concentrated. A concentrated milk adds creaminess without watering down a strong tea, and an original-style milk tea is about 30% evaporated milk, with the drinker adding sugar.

Three things set the tea itself apart:

• A strong blend. Cafés keep their blends secret, but a standard one is broken orange pekoe, broken orange fannings and tea dust, 30% each, plus 10% of a Lipton blend for aroma and texture.
• A long brew. Water at 96–98 °C is poured over the leaves and left for about 12 minutes, then the tea is poured back and forth through a cloth bag, typically four times, in a process called "pulling". Pull too often and the tea over-extracts; too little and it loses its punch.
• The "silk stocking". The cotton bag, stained brown with tea, looks like a stocking, which gave the drink its nickname, silk-stocking milk tea. It filters out the leaves, and tea makers credit it with a smoother cup.

In 2017 Hong Kong's government named the milk tea making technique to its Representative List of intangible cultural heritage, under traditional craftsmanship. The official entry breaks the craft into blending the leaves, boiling and infusing, "force-pouring" the tea, brewing, and force-pouring the milk. By industry estimates, Hong Kong drinks about 2.5 million cups of milk tea a day.

Where the name comes from

Yuenyeung is Cantonese for mandarin ducks. Because the birds appear in pairs, they became a Chinese symbol of conjugal love and, as the Leisure and Cultural Services Department explained, of things that come in pairs — and since the male and female look very different, the word suits a pairing of two unlike things. The South China Morning Post adds that the ducks' famous devotion is a myth: the male moves on once the eggs hatch.

In 2003 the department's Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware built a whole exhibition around the idea, with more than 100 coffee and tea vessels and ceramic sculptures made on the theme by 46 Hong Kong artists. Its announcement presented the drink as a fusion of East and West: black tea from China, milk from the Western way of drinking tea, and coffee.

Who invented it

Lan Fong Yuen, a dai pai dong-style café in Hong Kong, claims that its owner, Lum Muk-ho, invented both silk-stocking milk tea and yuenyeung in 1952. The claim to the milk tea is generally accepted; the claim to yuenyeung is unverified, and, as the South China Morning Post points out, other mixtures of tea and coffee have probably existed elsewhere.

In its early decades, according to the same paper, yuenyeung was a drink for blue-collar workers — construction workers, taxi drivers and others in physically demanding jobs — who drank it for its caffeine and for the idea of balance: tea was held to be cooling and coffee heating, so together they balanced the body's energy, or chi. Today it is drunk across Hong Kong society.

Beyond Hong Kong

• In Malaysia the same mix is common as kopi cham, from the Malay kopi, coffee, and the Hokkien chham, to mix.
• In 2010 Starbucks stores in Hong Kong and Macau sold a blended version, the "Yuen Yeung Frappuccino Blended Cream".
• For children, cafés make a caffeine-free children's yuenyeung from Horlicks and Ovaltine, two malted milk drinks.

Caffeine and calories

Caffeine depends on how strong the tea and coffee are, and both vary. As a baseline, the USDA puts ordinary brewed coffee at about 40 mg of caffeine per 100 g and brewed black tea at about 20 mg. A 250 ml cup made from 75 ml of coffee and 125 ml of tea at those strengths would carry about 55 mg — less than a 240 ml mug of filter coffee at about 95 mg. Hong Kong milk tea is brewed far stronger than ordinary tea, though, so a café yuenyeung carries more. The caffeine guide compares other drinks.

Fifty millilitres of evaporated milk — about 53 g — adds roughly 71 kcal and 5 g of milk sugar, and two teaspoons of sugar about 32 kcal, so the cup comes to about 105 kcal. Cafés that use sweetened condensed milk make a much sweeter drink: two tablespoons alone add about 120 kcal and 21 g of sugar.

For another coffee-and-tea hybrid, see the dirty chai latte; for iced coffees from Hong Kong's neighbours, see Thai iced coffee and Vietnamese coffee.