Tea that goes pop in your mouth.

Why this Taiwanese drink is more popular than ever

Call it the fad that forgot to fade. Bubble tea— tea shaken with milk, ice and sugar, often served with large tapioca pearls called boba— first emigrated from Taiwan to the Bay Area in the mid-1990s. At first, you could only find it at tiny shops such as Wonderful Foods in San Francisco’s Sunset District, which remains one of the last pioneers standing.

“Unless you're going to have some kind of mystical, ancient Chinese power from drinking it, [bubble tea] is not going to go anywhere, " Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999. Howwrong hewas.

Franchises like Lollicup and Quickly, a.k.a. the McDonald’s of Taiwanese snack shops, roared into themarket inthe 2000s, and Quickly has grown to 69Northern California locations. Still, the competition is swelling. According to Yelp, there are currently 75 additional bubble tea shops in San Francisco, the East Bay and the Peninsula; 14 of them have opened in the past fourmonths alone.

Some, such as ShareTea and Gongcha, are Taiwanese chains following in the wake of Quickly. Others, like Boba Guys and Purple Kow, are home grown microchains. They’re the Burgermeister to Quickly’s BK, upscaling bubble tea with premium teas, organic milk and housemade toppings.

High or lowend, there are somany drinks, flavors and toppings on their menus that calculating the possible combinations would require a higher degree in mathematics. Intra-boba trends such as crema (a whipped cream topping that is sometimes flavored with cream cheese) and honey-lemon oolong drinks replicate with epidemic speed.

The unifying factor: soda-high levels of sweetness.