Boba Pop UP!

Boba made its debut in the States around the late 1990s, when a number of Taiwanese tea chains opened up shop and started selling sugary brown chewy balls in sweet milk tea. By the 2000s, it had become a mainstay of Asian-American culture — a quick, affordable beverage embraced by the diaspora. Today, it is ubiquitous around the world and there are boba tea shops across the globe, from Dubai to Stockholm.

What exactly IS boba? We’re glad you asked!
The word boba technically refers to the bite-sized, chewy tapioca pearls found in bubble milk tea, though sometimes people use it to refer to the entire drink itself.
Boba comes from Taiwan and was invented in the 1980s either by a tea shop in the city of Taichung or Tainan on the west coast of the island. While the exact city and shop where it emerged is fiercely contested, the ingredient actually has its roots in traditional Taiwanese folk remedies. To combat heat stroke, agrarian households used to make miniature pearls out of sweet potato or tapioca starch and plop them in sugar water. This was said to help cook the body down. The pearls back then were bead-sized and transparent. In the 1980s, the pearls were enlarged, rolled together with brown sugar (which is what gives it its color) and added to milk tea. Today boba — also referred to as tapioca pearls or the bubbles in bubble milk tea — is almost always made up with a combination of starches.

It’s also DELICIOUS! So join us at the Bell Tower and get your boba on for just $5 each.