HEYTEA Gardenia 1

The HEYTEA Gardenia 1 is $7.90 and 10 calories, which makes it the lightest thing on the entire HEYTEA board. It is gardenia tea and nothing else.

The number in the name is a build code rather than a flavour note. Across the Tea Lab range, 1 means the tea on its own, 3.6 means the same tea with milk, and 5 means the same tea with coconut water. Read the menu that way and the whole section stops looking cryptic. Every Gardenia drink on the board starts from the same brew.

Gardenia tea is a scented green tea. Fresh gardenia flowers are layered with the leaf so the leaf takes on the perfume, then the flowers are removed before packing. The result smells floral and slightly creamy before you taste anything, which is unusual for a tea that carries no dairy at all.

What you get in the cup is thin, clean and barely sweet. At 2g of carbohydrate and no sugar at all, this is closer to a brewed tea you would make at home than to anything else HEYTEA sells. The perfume does the work that sugar does elsewhere on the menu.

That makes it the obvious order for anyone who wants the tea programme without the calories. HEYTEA spends real money on leaf sourcing, and the Tea Lab drinks are where that shows most clearly. A cup with no milk, no cloud and no topping has nowhere to hide a mediocre brew.

It also makes a useful reference point. Drink this first, then order the Gardenia 3.6 at $11.90, and the difference milk makes to a scented tea is immediate. The floral note goes from sharp and forward to rounded and buried.

Price is the one thing that surprises people. At $7.90 it is not the cheapest drink on the menu despite being the simplest, because the leaf is the whole cost. There is no syrup or dairy to dilute it with.

Order it hot in winter. The perfume lifts with heat and the drink is noticeably more floral than the iced version, which is worth knowing when the two cost the same.

For the coconut water version, the Gardenia 5 is $11.90. For a lighter tea from a different leaf, the Oolong Cold Brew is $6.50.