Not all boba shops are created equal. And some are definitely not worth getting a 10-stamp card. Despite drinking boba for almost 20 years, I’ve only recently discovered I’m a boba snob. It's not about the beverage, it's about the actual BOBA. Many tea stores have boba as a topping, so after the hundreds of boba drinks I've had in my life, I realized I needed to create a standardized system to adequately judge all boba. Remember, absolutely none of this is about the drink portion, this is solely on the normal sized boba (I don't do that mini boba or popping boba shit). No other toppings will be mentioned here.
Disclaimer: the usual drinks I get are the original milk tea, iced milk, rooibos, some variation of a green tea with cream, or a black tea with cream, with less or no sugar, and no ice.
freshness- when the drink is served, is the boba hot, warm, cold? (hot drinks excluded, since that tampers with the boba temperature)
stickiness- going along with the freshness, if I'm drinking out of the straw and the boba gets stuck, and I have to suck real hard until 5 clumped up boba slowly crawl through the straw, that is not fresh boba.
chewiness- super hard to describe. I've been looking up synonyms but nothing feels accurate. Basically, how many chews do you need before you can safely swallow a boba. Or, is the boba way too soft because it was overcooked? Way too firm because it's too old?
consistency- mixing boba batches, if done well, is unnoticeable. However, if there are hard bobas and soft bobas in the same drink, booo.
sweetness- anyone who's made boba at home and tasted it without adding a sweetener knows that boba sucks without a little bit of sugar. But does the boba have to be sitting in a honey bath? Can it be lightly doused in brown sugar?
size of the boba- I no longer frequent one of my favorite boba shops because they changed their boba manufacturer. It's in the middle of mini boba and normal boba. If normal, cooked and prepared boba was about 12mm in diameter, these bobas were 8-9mm. It was disappointing.
quantity of boba- If I don't get at least one boba in every sip, there's not enough. If I still have drink left when I finish the boba, there wasn't enough. I'm not going to downgrade a shop if they give too much boba though.