Lava Pearl, Flamingo, Golden Glow, Icy Grape Garden — these are not shades of nail polish or strains of weed but names of bubble teas.
Originally dreamed up in Taiwan, the basic bubble tea recipe consists of tiny, bouncy orbs called “boba” submerged in chilled nondairy milk or fruit-flavored tea. The boba, either chewy tapioca pearls or the more novel juice-filled “popping” variety, shoot into your mouth through a wide straw as you sip. While some find boba too slimy, many describe it as having “Q” texture, a Chinese culinary term for an ideal bounciness to food. Landing somewhere between a beverage and a snack, it makes for a unique experience.
The menus are complicated codes to crack. But they are not designed to intimidate.
Now’s a great time to get into bubble tea around Burlington. In the past year, two new spots have opened within boba-spitting distance of the Church Street Marketplace: Boba VTea at Always Full Asian Market and Deerly Yours at the City Hall Park kiosk.
I embarked on a bubble tea tasting mission with only vague notions of the drink’s peculiar properties. What I learned from visiting four bubble tea shops in the greater Burlington area — the aforementioned two, plus the longer-established Fresh Bubble Tea & Juice in South Burlington’s University Mall and Winooski’s Morning Light Bakery — was that ordering as a newbie can be overwhelming.
With ever-expanding lists of flavors, toppings, trendy TikTok-inspired concoctions and possible customizations, the menus are complicated codes to crack. But they are not designed to intimidate. Each place I visited does bubble tea a little differently, but what they have in common are staff members who meet customers’ confusion and indecision with expertise and patience.
While plain milk tea with tapioca pearls is often recommended to beginners, it doesn’t hurt to experiment. Bubble tea frequently brings enthralling chaos, and it’s best to embrace it.
Full of Fun
Boba VTea at Always Full Asian Market, 179 Bank St., Burlington, 800-1818, @alwaysfullbtv on Instagram
A full year after opening just off the Church Street Marketplace, the downtown second location of Always Full Asian Market began selling bubble tea over the winter at its front café counter, Boba VTea.
Though Boba VTea boasts a relatively short, navigable bubble tea menu, I still spent an awkwardly long time gazing up at it before ordering. In addition to the standard milk- and green tea-based fruit teas, it offers lemonades, specialty teas such as brown sugar matcha and Thai tea, and yogurt drinks inspired by Yakult, a Japanese probiotic beverage. For toppings, you can choose from tapioca pearls and a variety of fruit-flavored jellies and popping boba.
My friend Monica urged us toward her go-to, a mango milk tea with tapioca ($5.38), and general manager Corey Roesing suggested the popular lychee lime green tea with lychee popping boba ($6.13). We ordered both.
Strolling to a bench on Church Street, Monica and I decided the drinks were refreshing, true to their flavor names and not too sweet. Roesing later explained that Boba VTea goes intentionally easy on the sweeteners; on request, customers can sample their drinks and have the sweetness adjusted to taste. Mixing and matching flavors is also an option; one regular visitor always orders the brown sugar milk tea with banana flavor added, Roesing said.
Manager and co-owner Wen Dong sold bubble tea when he lived in China, Roesing said, and he and his wife, Mei Yu, Always Full’s primary owner, have wanted to offer it since they opened their first location on Williston Road in 2019.
Roesing peruses social media to find inspiration for new drinks. Soon, the shop will add a lavender matcha tea he saw on TikTok.
“We’ll try everything,” Roesing said. “If people like it, we’ll stick with it.”
A constant flurry of new drinks on the menu sounds like a great excuse for more summer-evening city strolls.
Head in the Clouds
Deerly Yours Boba, 149 College St., Burlington, deerlyyoursboba.square.site
Many Burlingtonians know that the blue-and-white cloud-shaped kiosk in City Hall Park has been home to the second location of Sherpa Foods’ Himalayan D’Lite café since last summer. But fewer realize that in April, Deerly Yours Boba moved in. Partnering with Sherpa Foods, owner Dani Banh now runs the kiosk, selling her specialty drinks alongside Sherpa’s Nepalese momos and curry.
Staring at the illustrated “Top 10 Items” posted outside the kiosk evoked the same feeling as when my dad took me to get a Starbucks Frappuccino for the first time in middle school. My eyes darted between overwhelmingly flashy menu items, from a Thai cookie swirl smoothie to a Taro Ocean fresh milk to a mango matcha latte.
With the help of fellow Seven Days intern Anthony and my Starbucks-obsessed inner child, I chose the rich-looking crème brûlée milk tea with brown sugar boba ($6.28) and the Flamingo, a strawberry-and-lychee-flavored drink with strawberry popping boba ($6.88). Those were just two of more than 60 possible drink options. Toppings go beyond typical boba and jelly to include egg custard and Oreo pieces.
Banh returned to her home country of Cambodia to train in a bubble tea shop for a few weeks before starting Deerly Yours, she said. While she learned some of her recipes on her visit there, others are from social media and her own experimentation.
In June, she offered a special avocado-and-coconut smoothie that was less successful than she’d hoped. Most people don’t think of avocado flavor as belonging in a sweet drink, she said. But with its layered pale blue, white and green color palette, the treat did not disappoint aesthetically.
“Every time you make [bubble tea], you put a lot of work into it,” Banh said. “When I see a drink I’ve made and see it’s pretty, I think it’s so satisfying.”
Banh asks every customer how sweet they want their drinks on a scale of zero to 100 percent, adjusting the amount of sugary syrup she adds based on their answer. Most milk teas can be made anywhere on this scale, and fruit teas start at 25 percent. She said most people prefer around 75 percent, so we chose that for both drinks, which was just right — the sugar rush I had been expecting never came.
The regular milk teas are made with nondairy milk, but the crème brûlée is topped with cold dairy milk foam and a pattern of caramelized brown sugar, like the dessert it’s named after. The sweet, chewy brown sugar boba was a good match for the drink’s creaminess.
The Flamingo was enhanced by the fresh fruit pieces submerged in it: an orange slice, strawberry bits and lychee pieces. All that in one cup with the strawberry popping boba may sound over the top. But Deerly Yours does not shy away from abundance.
A Latte Pearls
Fresh Bubble Tea & Juice, 155 Dorset St., Suite D17, South Burlington, 387-0365, freshbubbletea.com
On a recent Wednesday evening, employees at Fresh Bubble Tea & Juice were busy serving a long line of eager customers. Located in a brightly lit alcove in South Burlington’s University Mall, the spot makes drinks that are good fuel for a shopping trip.
Fresh Bubble Tea was the first dedicated boba place in the area when it opened in 2018 and is still the only one focused exclusively on the drink. It sells no food.
Plenty of options from the 60-plus-drink menu called out to me with their long and literal (but still somehow elusive) names. The creamy white peach oolong tea struck a chord, and several toppings — grass jelly and chia seeds, for example — intrigued me. The menu includes tea macchiatos, slushes and even chocolate milk.
But, being still in the wide-eyed and slightly risk-averse days of my bubble tea adventures, I chose a vanilla milk tea with tapioca pearls ($6.65) and a passion fruit green tea, also with tapioca ($6.90).
The vanilla had plenty of flavor, and the passion fruit drink tasted like a strongly brewed, sweetened iced tea. Besides the classic bubble tea and taro milk tea, owner Ryan Chen said, the Lava Pearl latte, a tea latte with tapioca and brown sugar syrup, is most popular.
Chen grew up in southern China, a hot spot for bubble tea, and visited the drink’s original birthplace of Taiwan to pick up more inspiration before opening his store. Fresh Bubble Tea’s ingredients are imported directly from Taiwan. Noticing that grape flavor has been gaining popularity online, Chen added Icy Grape Garden, a drink of his own design made with grape juice and crystal boba.
In June, Fresh Bubble Tea opened a second location in the Champlain Centre mall in Plattsburgh, N.Y., with the same menu as the Burlington location.
“It’s great to see our drinks welcomed in a new city,” Chen said.
Shedding Light
Morning Light Bakery, 106 E. Allen St., Winooski, 540-1771, morning-light-vt.com
When I first visited the Asian sweet-treat haven that is Morning Light Bakery in Winooski, I made the rookie mistake of going on a weekday. The bakery has a “secret menu” of milk tea that includes its own version of Hong Kong dairy milk tea, which uses a stronger tea blend; and classic-style yuenyeung, a blend of coffee, tea and milk. But prepping the required tea base is a long process that bakery owners King Liu and his wife, Lai, have time for only on weekends.
Luckily, the bakery had plenty of other delicious milk and fruit tea options for a Thursday visitor. I tried taro milk tea, a smooth, nutty vanilla drink tinted purple by taro root, with black tapioca ($6.29). White bubbles paired well with a green tea-based mango iced tea ($6.29).
While the black bubbles are made from tapioca flour cooked with brown sugar, the white ones come from the bulb of a konjac plant, another root vegetable. Nothing beats the satisfying chewiness of tapioca bubbles, but finding an alternative to popping boba that’s similarly light yet still toothsome was a score.
Although better known for its baked goods, Morning Light has sold bubble tea since opening in 2019. King and Lai’s son, Ken Liu, said the family avoids jumping on trends, limiting their menu to what they know how to make well.
“We definitely want to stick to something that brings in our value to the bubble tea scene in Vermont,” Ken said.
In a niche drink landscape as dynamic as this one, not even eight different cups of bubble tea were enough to pop the Burlington boba bubble. Back at the bakery on a Saturday, I ordered the iced yuenyeung with tapioca ($6.99). The beverage was like the eccentric relative of my usual iced coffee: similarly milky and bitter but with the chewy pearls to shake up the texture. Like that quirky family member, boba never fails to deliver an interesting twist on an otherwise ordinary sip.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Burlington’s Boba Bubble | Sampling four bubble tea spots in and around the Queen City”
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.
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