What is Yuanyang Milk Tea? Is There Coffee in Hong Kong Style Yuanyang? How to Make an Authentic Yuanyang?

What is "Yuan Yang"?

Since FrontStreet Coffee covered the origin of "Yuan Yang" in "Why Tea Plus Coffee is Called 'Yuan Yang'" late last year, many readers have grown curious about the taste and want to try this beloved hybrid of milk tea and coffee.

Besides visiting a Hong Kong-style tea restaurant, you can absolutely make it at home. It isn't difficult, and making it yourself lets you control every ingredient, so the result suits your own taste. Today FrontStreet shares how to make a classic Hong Kong-style Yuan Yang at home!

A quick refresher for those who missed the earlier article: in the broad sense, "Yuan Yang" (mandarin duck) is a waterfowl native to East Asia — "Yuan" is the male, "Yang" the female. Because they always appear in pairs, the word symbolizes love and companionship. To people in Guangdong and Hong Kong/Macau, "Yuan Yang" carries the sense of "two" or "a pair," so it also describes foods combining two different flavors. The famous "Hong Kong-style Yuan Yang" is exactly that: Hong Kong-style coffee combined with silk-stocking milk tea.

Because it contains both milk tea and coffee, the drink is also called "Yuan Yang Milk Tea" or "Yuan Yang Coffee." There's even a "Children's Yuan Yang" that swaps the coffee for Ovaltine, so kids who can't drink coffee can enjoy the flavor too.

What Are the Secrets of Making "Yuan Yang"?

As established, Yuan Yang is just coffee plus milk tea. Simple — just add milk and tea to coffee and you're done...

...(an old joke that never gets old) — but in reality, that's exactly how you end up with a Yuan Yang as bland as water. There's real craft involved. As Wong Ka-wa, the "Father of Milk Tea," put it: "Three parts coffee, seven parts tea, milk to taste — when you drink it, it's neither milk tea nor coffee, and both at once — that's a good Yuan Yang." So first you must build the two base beverages properly; their concentration and ratio are the details that matter. Only with sufficient concentration and the right proportion can the finished drink be fragrant, rich, and delicious.

The two bases are made in similar ways. Choose your "base ingredients" (coffee and tea leaves), then apply the classic Hong Kong-style method — "one brew, two steep, three pull, four reheat" — to produce a rich but never astringent "soup base."

Concretely: tea leaves go into a filter bag shaped like a silk stocking, then boiling water is poured over ("water rolls, tea shines," as the Hong Kong saying goes). Once the tea has steeped, comes the "tea pulling": holding the bag over an empty pot, pour the tea through the bag from a height, back and forth several times — this removes astringency and smooths the texture. Finally, the pulled tea rests on the stove over low heat, which brightens the tea's color. Hong Kong-style coffee follows the same routine, a step called "coffee pulling."

That full ritual is elaborate, so the steps below are deliberately simplified. On ingredient choice: early Yuan Yang favored fragrant, robust black tea, but — just as with coffee — people eventually discovered that blending teas produced more distinctive flavors, and every tea restaurant keeps its own secret formula. Coffee bean selection works the same way, which is why no two Hong Kong-style Yuan Yangs are quite alike. And the "milk" in "three parts coffee, seven parts tea, milk to taste" isn't fresh milk — it's concentrated evaporated milk. Hong Kong-style milk tea and Yuan Yang both demand that richness for a sufficiently mellow, silky texture.

With that covered, here's how to make a genuinely delicious Yuan Yang!

How to Make a Delicious "Yuan Yang"?

To stay as faithful as possible to the original flavor, FrontStreet used Ceylon black tea and Black and White evaporated milk, with FrontStreet's Indonesia Golden Mandheling as the coffee. Since the Hong Kong-style ritual is too cumbersome for home, we simplified it: the tea soup is made by direct boiling at a slightly larger ratio of 1:18 — 10 g of tea leaves to 180 ml of water, simmered gently for 20 minutes. The result looks like this — you can tell at a glance how concentrated it is.

For the coffee, many methods work — pour-over, moka pot, espresso — but we chose the simplest: pour-over. Note the coffee also needs high concentration, so the ratio tightens accordingly. FrontStreet's parameters: 15 g of grounds, 1:10 ratio, fine-sugar grind at 75% pass through a #20 sieve (the "iced-brew" grind for dark roasts), 90°C water, three-stage pouring, two-minute total extraction. First bloom with twice the coffee's weight in water (30 ml) for 30 seconds; then slowly pour the second stage (60 ml) in small circles; when the bed is exposed, pour the remaining 60 ml the same way. Once everything drains through, remove the dripper and the extraction is done.

Now assemble. You don't need to follow "three parts coffee, seven parts tea, milk to taste" literally — teas, coffees, and concentrations differ, so adjust to taste. The rule of thumb stands: if it tastes like neither milk tea nor coffee, but both, you've nailed an authentic Yuan Yang.

After several rounds of tweaking, FrontStreet's final parameters: 140 ml black tea, 70 ml coffee, 60 ml evaporated milk. Pour them into a warmed cup in sequence, stir well, and a classic Yuan Yang is complete!

This cup is genuinely comfortable to drink — one sip delivers the aromas of coffee and black tea simultaneously, with a taste that blends milk, tea, and coffee, balanced and never clashing. Since all three components are properly concentrated, the texture is predictably superb: mellow, silky, flawless. Add a pineapple bun and it's perfect. One note: this version contains no sugar, suiting black-coffee drinkers; if you can't handle bitterness, stir in a little condensed milk — it softens the bitterness and enriches the texture further.

Beyond the classic version, most cafes now serve a "Yuan Yang Latte": concentrated black tea added to a latte. Extract a very concentrated tea (some shops use black tea powder concentrate) and build it like a latte — equally simple. But whichever version you choose, the caffeine content is high. So if you'd rather not be wide awake at midnight, don't drink Yuan Yang too late in the day — otherwise...

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

The coffee half of Yuan Yang needs to stand up to strong tea and evaporated milk, which is why FrontStreet reached for the PWN Golden Mandheling — medium-dark roasted, full-bodied, herbal and chocolatey with barely any acidity. Its G1 grading (fewer than 3 defects per 300 g, 18+ screen size) and triple hand-sorting give the cup a clean sweetness that shines through the milk and tea.

If you'd rather buy beans suited to both coffee and milk drinks, the entry-level FrontStreet recommendations cover every palate: Ethiopia's washed Yirgacheffe Gedingding (jasmine, lemon, berry) or natural Huakui (berries, florals, jackfruit, melon, honey) for the floral-fruity camp; Brazil's Cerrado Red Bourbon and Queen Estate Yellow Bourbon (cream, nuts, cocoa, sugarcane sweetness) for balance lovers; and the wet-hulled Lintong Mandheling or PWN Golden Mandheling for anyone who wants the deepest, smoothest, most acid-free cup to anchor a milk tea.