The Gist: Beauty Pageant, but with store-bought milk tea instead

You will need:
1. 6 Bottles/Packets of Milk Tea of different brands
2. Pageant Rubrics + Judging Sheet
3. Pen
4. Cups (optional)
5. Water (optional; to rinse your mouth between tastings)

Instructions

Step 1: Acquire Contestants

aka Purchase Milk Teas.

If you're in Singapore, we recommend Don Don Donki. Otherwise, any grocery store (or asian supermarket) should have the necessary variety of milk teas needed for your upcoming pageant.

Step 2: Print out the Rubrics & Score Sheet

Download our Milk Tea Pageant PDF and print out the:

• Rubrics
• Judging Sheet
• Pageant Stage Sheets 1 & 2 (aka the tasting Placemat)

Step 3: Fill up the Rubrics

Recall your favorite milk tea(s), it doesn't have to be store-bought, it can be your own secret recipe or even bubble milk tea.
(Feel free to use this as an excuse to go buy/make said tea to help jog your memory.)

Think about what you like about it in terms of its flavor, the packaging (if applicable). Use these factors to help come up with your own rubrics for what factors an ideal milk tea should have.

Write them down on the rubrics sheet.

These will be the criteria you will be judging the participating milk teas on.

Feel free to include bonus points for things like creative packaging or healthy ingredients (or anything else really.)

Step 4: Line up your milk teas

Fill up the Pageant Stage sheet and place the milk teas in the corresponding circles.

Step 5: Let the judging begin

Get your pen and paper ready.
(And your water, if you feel like you need to rinse your mouth between rounds of judging.)

Start tasting the milk teas, and assign points based on your rubrics

Step 6: Optional Bikini Round

We at empori firmly believe that truly good milk teas are even better when warm.
So, we have included a 'Bikini Round' for the milk tea contestants.

tldr; heat up your milk tea and taste again!!

Step 7: Tally your score

Go through your judging sheet, tallying up the score for each contestant.
Feel free to revisit certain milk teas and adjust the scores before locking it in.

Step 8: 👑Crown the Winner!

"Ladies, gentleman and everyone in between and beyond. We present to you the winner of the first ever Milk Tea Pageant, the most Royal of all Milk Teas....."

<Insert epic ceremonial music>

"[INSERT NAME/BRAND OF THE WINNING MILK TEA]!!!!!"

🎉🎉🎊🥳🥂

👨‍🎨Artist's Notes

aka why we made this

We decided that for Sept-Nov'21, we'll be releasing a series of taste related MPTs.

We were originally going to create an Oddly Specific Milk Preferences MPT, to kind of echo the Oddly Specific Almond Milk MPT we did last month. But then we suddenly had a milk tea craving one day and one thing led to another and...

We ended up deciding that a Milk Tea Pageant would be a fun thing to do.
So we did!

The end.
🤷‍♂️

Milk Tea Trivia: What's the difference between Milk Tea and Royal Milk Tea

So as we were making this month's MPT cover image, we thought that because it's a pageant, the milk teas should be crowned.

This crowning of milk tea then reminded us of our go-to drink in cafes in Japan: Royal Milk Tea

Which then led to us wondering: why is it called Royal Milk Tea?

Like this isn't the name for a specific brand of milk tea. No, it's literally a TYPE of milk tea. As in, if you go to a Japanese Cafe, you have the option of ordering Milk Tea or Royal Milk Tea.

And it never occurred to us until last week to research what the difference is.

So it turns out, Royal Milk Tea isn't necessarily the "better" milk tea. Yes it's usually the more expensive one, but it's not because Royal Milk Tea uses better ingredients than regular milk tea (although it can).

The biggest difference between Royal Milk Tea and regular Milk Tea is that:

• Royal Milk Tea is tea cooked with water and milk
• Regular Milk Tea is normally brewed tea with (warmed) milk added afterwards

That's it. It's whether or not you cook the milk with the leaves.

As for why that makes the milk tea more "royal", apparently it's because Royal Milk Teas are naturally richer tasting.

Apparently: Richer = Royal

...makes sense.