Two things are true about Spot of Tea, a tea and boba company that’s been operating at pop ups and farmers markets in D.C. since 2017 and is opening its first permanent location inside NoMa’s Streets Market.

One is that its creations don’t taste like the bubble tea you can get at most shops serving the Taiwanese drink, generally made of a huge variety of different teas, milk teas, smoothies, and even coffee with chewy tapioca pearls (and pudding, or milk caps, or lychee jelly, or popping boba).

The drinks at Spot of Tea are, frankly, a yuppified version of the boba that I—and many other people who love the drink—are used to. Each cup of tea is brewed individually, using “high-quality, organic, and locally sourced ingredients,” per the website. And ingredients aside, the company’s official philosophy suggests a certain sense of superiority. “Spot of Tea uses the latest tea-brewing technology, unique tea blends, and local ingredients—not the standard artificial fruit syrups and powders, because they believe that both tea, and their community, deserves better,” reads a quote from the press release announcing their new location.

“I saw an industry that is using subpar ingredients, isn’t treating the processes well,” says Andrew Maust, one of the co-owners of Spot of Tea, about other boba shops. “And I thought there might be a little bit of room to improve, use better quality ingredients, create something that tastes better, [and] that’s better for you at the end of the day.”

Such an attitude toward a beloved food—and one entrenched in Taiwanese culture and the culture of many cities where Taiwanese immigrants have made it wildly popular—might rankle some people.

But the other thing that’s true about Spot of Tea is that it makes really excellent drinks. The tea is obviously fresh and high quality, and the boba is cooked to the correct firmness—a feat that should be the lowest of bars for any shop that sells the stuff, but that is often the hardest one for them to meet.

Important for a tea and boba shop, the drinks are also highly customizable. You can adjust the ice level and sweetness of each drink to very specific levels (20 percent sweetness? 40 percent? They can do that). One thing to remember about the drinks at Spot of Tea is that their full sweetness level is significantly less sweet than at other shops. While I normally ask for my milk tea with no sugar at all, I would order it here with about 50 percent sweetness.

The menu at Spot of Tea is fairly small, particularly compared to other shops where the breadth of available drinks and toppings can feel legitimately overwhelming.

At the opening, the shop will have available a lavender earl gray tea, cinnamon oolong, hibiscus ginger, blue jasmine, and matcha—all of these run at $3.50 on their own, plus fifty more cents for boba pearls or chia seeds, the only available toppings. You can also order classic milk tea, grapefruit mint tea, coconut chai, and coffee. One crucial note: Unlike other boba shops in both the U.S. and Taiwan, which rarely or never use dairy in their teas and substitute with non-dairy milk powder, Spot of Tea uses either half and half or oat milk in their drinks (you can choose which).

Glenn Baginski, another of Spot of Tea’s five owners, says he knows that the drinks at Spot of Tea are quite different from the ones American boba-drinkers are used to. But he says that, to his palate, the sweetness and freshness of the tea are closer to what he remembers tasting when he visited his mother’s family in Taiwan as a kid. “The tea that you see over here at other boba tea places, I think, is quite different from Taiwanese boba tea,” Baginski says (though boba shops in Taiwan still routinely use ingredients like syrups and powders in their tea). For one thing, the tea he drank in Taiwan is generally much less sweet, more in line with the sweetness levels they use at Spot of Tea, he says. And for another, the Taiwanese tea he drank was rarely made into concentrate, sitting in large vats all day—it was made in a batch and sold within two hours, when people were commuting to or from work and school, he says.

That freshness is something Spot of Tea is trying to preserve and replicate—at their counter near the Streets Market entrance, they use machines called BKON craft brewers that individually brew each cup of tea in about a minute, so that they don’t have to batch-brew anything.

Dillon Chai, another Spot of Tea owner, says that their drinks have surprised people, both in a positive and negative way. “A lot of taste is based on expectation, so potentially at first it could be off-putting if you’re expecting that particular [bubble tea flavor],” he says. “Many people will say like ‘oh I actually do like this,’ and sometimes people say ‘oh well we still prefer traditional bubble tea shops.'”

When Spot of Tea opens on Oct. 20, the first 50 customers will get a free drink, and every customer all day will get a buy-one-get-one deal. Eventually, the owners say, they plan to expand tea and topping options and offer smoothie bowls.

Spot of Tea is located inside Streets Market at 51 M St. NE. Open daily 8 a.m.-7 p.m.