Yuenyeung
Hong Kong milk tea combined with brewed coffee, in roughly a three-to-seven ratio. Named after mandarin ducks, which are conventionally depicted as a pair, the drink is a Hong Kong invention and is drunk in enormous quantity there.
Also called coffee with tea, yuanyang.
What it tastes like
Neither one thing nor the other, which is the point: the coffee adds body and bitterness while the tea keeps a brisk astringency the coffee alone would not have.
What it is built on
Teas
- Ceylon black tea — Brisk and clean, with a citrus lift that survives milk better than most. High-grown lots are bright and almost delicate; low-grown lots are dark, thick and closer in weight to Assam.
Brewing method: Boiling and decoction — Leaf, and usually other ingredients, simmered in water or milk rather than steeped — the basis of masala chai, butter tea and noon chai.
Ingredients
- 210 ml Hong Kong-style milk tea
- 90 ml Brewed coffee
- Evaporated milk and sugar, to taste
Preparation
- Step 1. Prepare strong milk tea in the Hong Kong style.
- Step 2. Brew coffee separately and strong.
- Step 3. Combine roughly seven parts tea to three parts coffee, and adjust.
Serves 1. About 20 minutes from start to finish, including anything that has to simmer or cool.
Equipment
- Tea strainer — A gaiwan lid or a pot’s own integral filter usually suffices; a strainer catches what they miss, particularly with broken leaf.
There is no single correct version
Served hot or iced across Hong Kong cha chaan teng, and the ratio varies by shop. A Malaysian equivalent, cham, follows the same idea with local milk-tea practice.
The steps above are one workable account of how this is made, not the authoritative recipe. Households and regions differ on proportions, on order and sometimes on what counts as the drink at all.
Common mistakes
- Using weak tea, which the coffee simply overwhelms
Sources
This page is TeaHQ synthesis. The proportions and the sequence are written from common practice as TeaHQ understands it, with no external source behind them, which is one more reason to read the note on regional variation as the more reliable part of the page.
This page describes how the drink is made and where it is made that way. It says nothing about what drinking it does to a person, and the quantities of milk, sugar or spice are recorded because they are part of the recipe rather than as any kind of recommendation.
Written comparisons
Where TeaHQ has set this drink against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.
- Yuenyeung vs Hong Kong milk tea — One drink is the other with coffee in it, in roughly a three-to-seven ratio, and the addition changes more than it sounds. Yuenyeung is a Hong Kong invention named after mandarin ducks, which are conventionally depicted as a pair.