HEYTEA Longjing Milk Tea

The HEYTEA Longjing Milk Tea is $8.49 and 220 calories, and it is the one to order when the jasmine version starts feeling too floral. Golden longjing tea with real dairy milk, and nothing else.

Longjing, sometimes written dragon well, is a pan-fired green tea from Hangzhou and it tastes nothing like jasmine. Where jasmine is floral and light, longjing is nutty and slightly toasted, with a chestnut quality that comes from the firing rather than from anything added. Against milk it reads darker and rounder than you expect from a green tea.

That makes this the more grown-up of the two plain milk teas. There is no perfume to it at all. The finish is clean and faintly savoury, and it holds up better as the ice melts because there is more body in the tea to begin with.

The numbers sit almost exactly alongside the jasmine version: 220 calories against 220, 21g of sugar against 23g, and the same $8.49 price. The choice between them is purely about which tea you want, which is unusual on a menu where most decisions involve a trade-off.

Longjing is also the base HEYTEA uses for its cheese cloud milk tea, so ordering this one first tells you what is underneath the Longjing Cheese Milk Tea before you commit to the heavier version.

It works better hot than most drinks on this menu, if the shop will make it that way. The nuttiness opens up with heat in a way the floral teas do not, and it is one of the few things here that would make sense in winter.

Sugar behaves differently here too. Longjing carries a natural sweetness from the firing process, so the drink tastes sweeter than its 21g of sugar suggests. Light Sugar lands closer to where most people expect Less Sugar to sit, which makes this a useful drink for anyone cutting back without losing the character of what they are drinking.

For the floral alternative at the same price, the Jasmine Milk Tea is the direct comparison. For the same longjing under a salted cheese cap, the Longjing Cheese Milk Tea is $9.99.