Could robots save Hong Kong milk tea from extinction? KamChAI automates making of cha chaan teng staple
KamChAI is a 300kg, two-metre-tall robot tea maker that brews nine cups of tea in 12 minutes and can pull off the silk-stocking straining technique – a dying art in Hong Kong’s hospitality industry
KamChAI’s steel arms whirr as it boils water and pours milk. Beside the robot, human Ip Tat-sang, champion of the 2018 Kam Cha brewing competition, deftly strains tea through a “silk stocking”.
In this tense face-off, man and machine are going head to head in a demonstration of Hong Kong-style milk-tea making run by the Association of Coffee and Tea of Hong Kong in Kwai Chung.
Many workers worry that robots and artificial intelligence will rob them of their jobs. That’s not the case in Hong Kong’s food and beverage industry, though, where KamChAI and others like it could help fill vacancies that humans show little interest in.
Built by the Association of Coffee and Tea together with the Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC), KamChAI – Cantonese for “golden boy” – is Hong Kong’s first AI tea maker, and has been programmed to brew a drink developed by cha chaan teng, or tea cafes. It was unveiled at the 2018 Hong Kong Food Expo this month.
Milk tea is a favourite Hong Kong drink and was included on a list of the city’s intangible cultural heritage in 2014. It originated with local adaptations of the British tea style that experimented with different blends of black tea strained through a cloth resembling a silk stocking. It also used denser evaporated milk rather than fresh milk.
