HEYTEA Cloud Jasmine Tea (Original)

The HEYTEA Cloud Jasmine Tea (Original) is $7.49 and 250 calories, and it is the reason the rest of this menu exists. Jasmine green tea under a cap of cheese cloud, on the board since 2012, and the drink that invented a category.

Before this, salted cheese foam on tea was not a thing anybody sold. HEYTEA put it on a jasmine base in a small shop in Jiangmen and the idea spread far enough that cheese tea now turns up on menus in cities where nobody has heard of the brand. Order this and you are drinking the original version of something you have probably had a copy of.

It is also the plainest expression of the idea. There is no fruit here, no colour, nothing layered for effect. Cold jasmine green tea, and on top of it a thick salted cream cheese foam. The whole drink is the interaction between those two things, which is why it is the best one to order first if you want to understand what cheese tea actually is.

Take the first mouthful over the rim without a straw. Salt lands first, then the cream, then the jasmine underneath cuts through both. The salt is doing the same job salt does in caramel: it stops the sweetness from flattening out and makes everything behind it taste more like itself.

At 250 calories and 25g of sugar it is the lightest of the cheese cloud drinks, since there is no fruit pulp adding sugar underneath. The 10g of fat comes almost entirely from the cloud, which is what gives the cup its weight.

It is also the cheapest cloud drink on the menu at $7.49, which makes it the sensible way to find out if cheese tea suits you before spending $10.49 on the fruit versions.

The cloud is also the part that decides when to drink it. A fresh cap holds its shape for roughly five minutes, folds into the tea over the next ten, and after that the drink is simply a sweetened jasmine tea with cream through it. That is still pleasant, but it is not what you paid for, so this is a poor choice for a long walk home.

For the same cloud over fruit, the Cloud Crisp Grape adds crushed grape underneath. For the jasmine base without the cloud, the Jasmine Tea is $5.49 and shows you exactly what the cloud is sitting on.