If you’ve never been to Tempo Tea Bar in Glasgow’s Queens Street, you’ve never truly experienced incredible bubble tea. Established in 2013 by May Gem, Tempo has strived from day one to provide excellent drinks, excellent treats and put back into the local community.
While they’ve offered online deliveries of all of their items (from their own hand picked teas and bubbles, to imported snacks, even to their own community designed reusable bottles and shirts) for some time, as of August 2020, they started offering a monthly subscription box – a new bubble tea flavour and hand chosen Asian snacks delivered right to your door!
August’s box featured not only their in-store made grape syrup with lychee popping boba, they also provided their mixed fruit jelly topping, three plastic boba straws and their gorgeous rainbow metal straw. The 150ml bottle of syrup made a little over 3 teas – I actually managed to get 4 full drinks!
I made a hot tea with the lychee topping as soon as it arrived. It was sweet, but not sickeningly so. The grape flavour did taste like grape sweets and less like fresh from the punnet grape, but it was a perfect compliment to the fruity lychee popping boba! It was light and warming – perfect for a chilly night.
A few days later I made a cold tea and popped it into my reusable bottle – and while it tasted totally different, it was still just as tasty! Cooling and refreshing while still being packed with flavour. I also took directions from the tea making booklet and added the grape syrup to some lemonade and it was incredible! Even better than any grape soda I’ve ever had and half way through finishing it I even added some of the boba and the mixed jelly – just for fun – and it was a great experience.
The box also came with two chocolatey treats – the Kabaya Puchi Pastel Chocolate Cone Snacks and Meiji Apollo Rich Strawberry Chocolates. The Chocolate Cone Snacks are a biscuit centre, with a chocolate cone and a sugar coating top to make it look like an ice cream cone! The box can be folded out and cut to be a tiny little ice cream shop front, with a little shop sign and plate to boot! While the chocolate itself it’s incredible, it’s definitely easy to eat the whole packet without blinking an eye. It’s not too bitter or sweet, with a slight creamy edge and I’m always a sucker for a biscuit centre.
The strawberry chocolates on the other hand smelled incredible right off the bat. At first, they didn’t taste the best – the strawberry taste was very artificial however once the dark chocolate taste kicked in and mixed with the strawberry flavour they were absolutely incredible. I will be totally honest, I didn’t expect much from them and I know that dark chocolate definitely isn’t for everyone, however these are already my new favourite chocolates.
All of this isn’t to say there aren’t areas for improvement. I feel the boba could have been put into a more suitable container. The bottle they came in was too small to get a spoon into so I couldn’t spoon the boba into my drink and accidentally poured a lot of the lychee syrup into my tea and struggled to get the boba out. Also I think a note somewhere saying how many servings come in the bottle or kit would be useful too – I think the reason I managed to get 4 servings was because I was being a little delicate with the syrup as I didn’t want to be left with a half a serving of syrup.
Overall, I loved the box. It was great to be able to experience the same great quality drink at home as if I went into the store as well as the exciting fun of making it myself and trying out new flavours and combinations. Knowing that I have another one coming this month is even more exciting, and I even reordered the grape kit because August’s box was so tasty!
If you would like to grab some of the products listed in this review for yourself then you can visit their physical shop or purchase them online via their Shopify store. Make sure and follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram so you don’t miss any deals, new products and other fun things.
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