What does a coffee pot how to use guide teach about prep?

Chabaidao's mulberry fruit tea Wu Qi Ma Hei returns this year with a new Triple Berry Goodnight Cup, and the official focus is fresh hand-peeling and same-day squeezing. Frozen mulberry pieces are replaced by fresh fruit, so staff must peel and stem mulberries, hand-mash strawberries and squeeze juice daily. Consumers welcomed the change; kitchen workers did not.

Employees have flooded social media with complaints about the added prep, saying the work multiplies with every cup. The drink first appeared in summer 2022, mixing mulberries with strawberries, pineapple and bergamot lemon for a dark color, and has returned each year since. Much as a coffee pot how to use guide stresses step-by-step prep, one extra step here becomes many, and coffee grades of labor intensity show in the backlash.

Tea Baidao's classic mulberry fruit tea "Wu Qi Ma Hei" returns this year in an upgraded form, alongside the new release "Triple Berry · Goodnight Cup." The official claim is that the new version focuses on fresh hand-peeling and same-day fresh squeezing, with a stronger burst of juice from the fruit pulp, and consumers are quite sold on it. However, for the workers in the store's back kitchen, this upgrade has turned into a nightmare—swapping frozen mulberry pieces for fresh mulberries turns one step into many, multiplying the difficulty and labor of prep work. Complaints flood social media, with employees crying out "peeling until I go crazy" and "prep work is driving me insane." This article takes you behind the production changes and the real feedback from frontline staff behind this seasonal limited-edition drink.

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In the summer of 2022, Tea Baidao launched a drink called "Wu Qi Ma Hei." Because it uses deep-colored mulberries as the main ingredient, blended with strawberries, pineapple, and bergamot lemon, the entire drink takes on a dense, dark-black appearance. Not long after hitting the menu, it built up a large following thanks to its good reputation, and has returned on schedule every year since.

As the new season's mulberries ripen one after another, this year's "Wu Qi Ma Hei" has officially made its comeback amid the anticipation of many consumers, with the new product "Triple Berry · Goodnight Cup" launched at the same time.

According to the official introduction, this returning "Wu Qi Ma Hei" is an upgraded version. The flavor still follows the original recipe; the difference lies in adjustments to the ingredient preparation process. In order to preserve the juicy burst from large chunks of fruit pulp, Tea Baidao stipulates that every cup must be made by hand-peeling on the spot—mulberries must be freshly peeled and stemmed, strawberries must be hand-mashed, and mulberry juice must also be freshly squeezed the same day. The entire process revolves around one word: "fresh."

The R&D team rolled out an improved version, and consumers naturally welcomed it—mulberry lovers in particular voiced their delight. But for the back-kitchen workers, every "selling point" Tea Baidao promotes has ultimately become their nightmare.

As the saying goes, there's no harm without comparison. According to employees, the "old version of Wu Qi Ma Hei" launched a few years earlier used frozen mulberry pieces. To make it, you only needed to thaw them in advance, then add fixed amounts of other fruits and ingredients according to the recipe, and finally shake it evenly with a machine—simple and efficient.

This year, however, Tea Baidao went against its usual practice: the new product switched entirely to fresh mulberries, and in the production process, the R&D department not only required hand-peeling and stemming of the fruit pulp and fresh-squeezed juice, but also forcibly split what was originally one step into multiple procedures.

First, employees need to peel the delicate mulberries one by one into ready-to-eat pulp pieces for later use; then another batch of mulberries is blended with pineapple into a puree, which is then pressed hard through a filter cloth to extract rich mulberry juice.

According to early-shift employees, this mulberry's pomace is extremely fine, and once poured into the filter bag, it's very hard to squeeze out the juice. If you use other Tea Baidao products as a reference, it's equivalent to "5 cups of wheat juice = 2 cups of strawberry juice = 1 cup of mulberry juice." After finally squeezing out a bucket and putting it on the shelf, just a few drinks use it up easily, so the difficulty of prep work gets maxed out all over again.

Besides the extremely tedious stocking process, these employees also said that the production flow for the upgraded "Wu Qi Ma Hei" and the new product is considerably more complicated than the original version. Making even one cup adds at least several extra steps, truly time-consuming and labor-intensive.

As for taste, everyone feels the new version isn't much better than the old one—it just adds a lot of workload—so they really can't understand the R&D department's "mystifying moves."

Less than a day after the mulberry series launched, looking across the related discussions on social platforms, aside from posts reviewing the taste, the rest are either workers on the edge of "going crazy" or voices complaining about their own R&D department: "Freshly made, sure, but it kinda costs you your staff," "Peeling mulberries until I go crazy at Tea Baidao's fruit shop," "Prep work is driving me insane—R&D, come out and explain," "You just have to squeeze it—the R&D department is giving us no way to live"... For back-kitchen employees, perhaps no news is more comforting than the fact that it's a seasonal limited edition.

Image source: online screenshot

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.