Starting her own business in her early 20s was nerve racking, but Lina Yang brought a new and unique taste to Sheboygan – and it’s been a hit.
Bestea, Sheboygan’s first boba tea shop, is located at 1112 Michigan Ave. in the heart of downtown Sheboygan and brings the trendy taste of the Asian sweet drink treat to the city on the Lake Michigan shore that is famous for its bratwurst. Yang started the business when she was young. At just 24, she decided to go into business for herself after she realized that the corporate world wasn’t for her.
“I went to college when I was 17, and I planned to major in accounting, but then I decided that wasn’t for me. I dropped out and I got a corporate job,” Yang said. “I was like, ‘I’m not cut out for this. I need to be on my feet. I need to be interfacing with other people.’”
She remained in the corporate world for around six years as she moved up the ladder. Yang started at HSA Bank in an entry level position. After around nine months, she moved up to project manager and then later an associate account director.
When she would travel around the United States and abroad, she would always get boba tea no matter where she was. As she grew her palette for it and started to make her own drinks, Yang was steadily encouraged by family and friends to open her own cafe.
“I would sell it to my friends and family, and they’re like, ‘Lina, this is really good. You need to open a cafe.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you sure? I don’t think it’s that great,’” she said. “In Sheboygan at that time, there weren’t any other boba places. So I took a leap of faith.”
Coupled with encouragement and a growing realization that she didn’t want to work a corporate career her whole life, Yang decided to take action. She opened her shop in 2023 while juggling her corporate job for the first four months.
Hours were limited from 5-9 p.m. around her corporate job schedule. People asked why her hours were so limited while it was so busy. She knew that there was a growing demand for Bestea, but struggled to do both. When her sister and brother came home over summer break from college, they agreed to get trained and help her run the shop.
“That’s when my hours became longer and a lot of people enjoyed that. When it was the end of July, I was able to quit my corporate job,” Yang said. “Looking back, I don’t even know how I did it.”
Yang figured if she was going to start her own business, then the best time would be now while she was young and didn’t have kids.
As she prepared to start her own shop, Yang describes her process as that of a “mad scientist.” She experimented with recipes and relied on her previous experience tasting boba around the world.
“I knew what I wanted to create, what I felt was good and what I thought wasn’t good. When I crafted my recipes, I crafted it so that it tasted at the highest standard for me,” Yang said. “I tried different milks, different sweeteners from distributors, I tried my own sweeteners. My base sweetener right now is made in-house from a recipe I created myself because I felt like the sweeteners from other distributors weren’t what I was looking for.”
She wanted the consistency to be just right for Bestea. Other distributors use ingredients like sugarcane. Traditionally boba uses brown sugar. Distributors of sweetener use sugarcane because it’s generally cheaper than brown sugar — but that meant the quality didn’t line up with Yang’s vision for its sweetness.
Yang crafts and tests everything on the menu. While some are typical recipes most places would have, others are original to Bestea. Freeze versions and seasonal flavors are special to the shop.
Now Yang is a year into Bestea. She’s been learning as she goes and continuously reaching the community as a popular mainstay. She pushes the people of Sheboygan to try something they may have never heard of.
“They always kind of get a little bit wary of having to chew their drink,” Yang said. “One year in, and we still had so many people come in and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh. We don’t know about boba. Can you explain it to me?’ I think there is such a big population in our area here, a great population that loves it, but just hasn’t gotten to it yet.”
She encourages everyone, including her employees, to try every drink on the menu. She finds it hard to explain some of the spices, so to get people to understand is to sample drinks.
Success has followed Bestea since its opening. It was initially in a smaller location with limited space that wasn’t conducive to the calm hangout spot Yang envisioned. She wanted Bestea to be a location where people can stay a while to play board games, work, do homework — a regular cafe.
After 11 months, this past March, Bestea moved over to Michigan Avenue to accomplish that. Yang feels a lot of pride in Bestea’s performance that it was able to upgrade locations in under a year.
“That was one of the greatest blessings. I don’t think a lot of people can say they upgraded to a whole new space even before they hit their one-year mark. Because of the love from my customer that I’ve gotten, I was able to do that,” she said.
The community continuously supports Yang and Bestea. They are frequently encouraging her to expand into franchising her store into other areas of Wisconsin. People have encouraged her to open up a new location in West Bend, Manitowoc and Wausau — where Yang is originally from.
She hopes to follow through on opening a new location three or four years down the line, but for now she’s fine with her shop in Sheboygan.
“I always tell my customers thank goodness I own the place, because, holy cow, what this would be doing to my bank account would be deadly,” she says.
