HEYTEA Jasmine Tea

The HEYTEA Jasmine Tea is $5.49 and 70 calories, which makes it both the cheapest drink on the menu and by a wide margin the lightest. Jasmine green tea, scented with what HEYTEA describes as more than 3,000 jasmine blossoms, and nothing else in the cup.

This is the drink that shows you what a tea shop can actually do with tea. There is no fruit pulp, no milk, no cheese cloud and no topping to cover a bad brew. What arrives is a tall cup of cold jasmine green tea, and the quality of the leaf and the brew is the entire experience.

It holds up. The jasmine is floral without turning perfumed, which is the failure mode of cheap scented tea, and the green tea underneath stays clean rather than grassy. There is a slight astringency at the finish that stops it reading as flavoured water. Cold, over ice, it drinks closer to a good iced tea at a restaurant than to anything in the bubble tea category.

At 15g of sugar and no fat at all, it is the only drink on the HEYTEA menu that fits comfortably into an ordinary day without any accounting. Everything else on the list sits between 165 and 445 calories. This one is 70.

That makes it the obvious order alongside food, where a cheese cloud drink would fight with what you are eating, and the obvious order if you are buying a second drink in a day. It is also the base that several other drinks on the menu are built on, so ordering it once tells you what is underneath the Jasmine Milk Tea and the cloud drinks.

The sugar setting matters here more than anywhere. At Less Sugar the tea is forward and slightly dry. At No Added it becomes a straight unsweetened iced jasmine tea, which is worth trying once even if you order it sweet afterwards.

To add milk to the same base, the Jasmine Milk Tea is $8.49. For the same tea under a cheese cloud cap, the Cloud Jasmine Tea (Original) is the 2012 drink that started the category.