Bitter Orange Tea:

Bitter orange tea is a beverage unique to Hakka communities in Central and Northern Taiwan. We travel to Beipu Township in Hsinchu County to meet with Liu Wei-ming, who spends his days in the mountains making bitter orange tea. This tea must go through nine cycles of steaming and sun-­drying, after which it is charcoal roasted and stored for three years to develop its sweet, mellow taste.

The origins of bitter orange tea

The “bitter orange” in the name of this tea refers to a hybrid citrus fruit, Citrus × aurantium (also known as the sour orange, Seville orange, etc.), and in particular a group of cultivars named “Hutou Gan,” meaning “tiger-head tangerine.” It is a large-sized fruit with a reddish-orange color that ripens right around the Lunar New Year and is often used by Hakkas as a religious offering. Because it is set out as an offering in one’s own home to show reverence to one’s ancestors, naturally it should also be produced by oneself, which is in keeping with the Hakka attitude of not asking others for help. Accordingly, almost every household would traditionally have a Hutou Gan tree in front of it. These trees are very prolific, with each one producing more than 100 fruits per year, so after eight fruits are selected as an offering (eight being an auspicious number in Chinese), the question arises of what to do with the rest.

In fact, the pulp of the Hutou Gan is too bitter to eat, but Hakka people are unwilling to let anything go to waste, so they have used the fruit to make tea. It is important to note that this tea has not been a beverage consumed by modern people as part of their daily routines, but rather is a venerable Hakka “home remedy” that predates the development of modern medicine.

To make traditional bitter orange tea, a hole is cut into the top of a Hutou Gan bitter orange and the pulp is extracted, while carefully keeping the peel whole. The pulp is then mixed with tealeaves and medicinal herbs, and the mixture is stuffed back inside the intact peel. Liu Wei-ming explains that the medicinal herbs in bitter orange tea are all gathered within a radius of 50 kilometers, so each household has its own recipe, which is a jealously guarded secret. However, traditionally these herbs have always included some from among mugwort, fiveleaf gynostemma, licorice, mulberry leaf, coatbuttons, mint, loquat leaf, and Chinese fevervine, all of which have properties of clearing phlegm, relieving cough, and reducing fever.

The raw material for bitter orange tea is the Hutou Gan bitter oranges used for religious offerings by Hakka people. They are too sour for eating, so thrifty Hakkas use them to make tea.

Liu Wei-ming has invested more than ten years in making tea, taste-testing tea, and inventing “half-fruit tea.” He wants more people to know about bitter orange tea and to pass along Hakka culture.

No easy sell

In days gone by bitter orange tea was considered so precious that when a daughter of a Hakka family married and her parents worried that no one in her husband’s household would take good care of her, they would put several cakes of the tea into her trousseau. Hsu Mei-yu, chair of the Shuiqi Community Development Association in Beipu, relates that once when she was telling the story of bitter orange tea in the association’s exhibition space, an old woman in her seventies told her that when she got married, her grandfather gave her six cakes of bitter orange tea, and she still had two of them to that day.

Liu Wei-ming points to several characteristics of this beverage that are obstacles to promoting it to a wider public. After the mixture of tealeaves, fruit pulp and herbs is stuffed inside the orange peel, the hole plugged, and the peel tied with cotton string to hold it together, the resulting ball-shaped cake of compressed tea undergoes nine cycles of steaming and sun-drying, turning it black and hard. The process of breaking it apart is a strenuous task that requires the use of a kitchen cleaver or a hammer. Once the tea cake is broken open, the tea needs to be consumed as soon as possible, or its fragrance will dissipate. Moreover, it must be simmered for a several minutes to bring out its mild sweetness, which makes it even less user-­friendly.

But bitter orange tea also has many appealing aspects. It can be stored for many years without going bad, and stands up well to being simmered or infused for long periods of time. It is also mild and is not a stimulant, so it can be drunk at night. Meanwhile, when you drink it down to the last drop this is highly emblematic of the waste not, want not spirit of the Hakka people. In addition, research suggests that bitter orange tea can scavenge free radicals and so bolster the body’s immune system, making it a healthful drink.

Bulging, tightly bound Hutou Gan oranges have a cute appearance.

Bitter orange tea contains herbs that are added for their medicinal effects. In days gone by every Hakka family had its own jealously guarded secret recipe.

Nine cycles of steaming and drying

If you want to categorize bitter orange tea, it can be considered a “black tea” among the six major Taiwanese tea types defined by the Tea and Beverage Research Station. The tea liquor is blackish brown in color, and it is considered a 100% post-fermented tea. The most important step in giving it these characteristics is the series of “nine cycles of steaming and sun-drying” in the production process.

Liu Wei-ming did considerable research of his own, visiting widely with makers of bitter orange tea and trying the tea after each individual steaming and sun-drying step to discover the hidden reason why there need to be nine cycles. His conclusion: “Things made with Chinese medicinal herbs need steaming and sun-drying, to allow them to ferment.”

The tea mixture compressed inside the orange peel contains microorganisms, and each cycle of steaming and sun-drying creates a hot, humid environment that encourages the microbes to ferment time and again. This curing process removes off-flavors and the taste of the fruit, and makes the taste of the tea increasingly mild with each cycle, until ultimately all that is left is the sweet, mellow flavor of the aged tea. The purpose of sun-drying is not merely to dry the tea mixture, but more importantly for the ball-shaped tea cake to absorb sunlight, making the aged tea highly fragrant. However, because the fragrance can easily dissipate if the tea cake is broken open too soon, the tea must be stored for three years to lock the aroma in. The storage conditions are also important: the storage space should be cool, dry and dark.

In addition, each cycle of steaming and sun-drying makes the tea cake smaller, so that the string wrapped around the outside must be retied. “This compression enables microfermentation by good microbes to continue during the later storage period. If there are large voids in the tea mixture, this will impact the activity of the microbes. This is a critical element in the process.”

Steaming and sun-drying are important steps in the fermentation process for bitter orange tea. The number of cycles cannot be reduced and drying by electrical heating does not achieve satisfactory results.

Tradition with innovation

Liu Wei-ming has for many years worked on the problem of how to popularize bitter orange tea. He collaborated with an artist in Tainan to design a special tool for breaking open the tea cakes, and sought out ceramics master Chang Kuo-sen to use clay from Miaoli County to make ceramic vats for aging the tea and ceramic pots for brewing it, adding to the culture surrounding this beverage.

Given the large size of the Hutou Gan oranges traditionally used to make the tea, the chunks that result when the tea cake is broken apart are so large that most people find it hard to use up all the tea in a short time, so they won’t get the optimum flavor of the tea for long. Therefore Liu began experimenting with smaller citrus fruits. Recently he has found lemon to be the easiest fruit to work with. He takes the peel of half a lemon, fills it with a mixture of tealeaves, herbs, fruit pulp and juice, then uses a ring of peel from around the stalk as a cover and binds the whole thing together with string to turn a single fruit into a “half-fruit” tea cake. He has also experimented with other small citrus fruits, such as Lanyu bitter orange, Hirami lemon, or rangpur, which he cuts in half before filling the peels with tea mixture and recombining them. Meanwhile, large Hutou Gan oranges can be cut into four or eight pieces to make smaller tea cakes which are suitable for sharing.

We ask with curiosity: What about oranges or tangerines? Liu immediately rejects the idea: “No way. To make bitter orange tea you must use sour fruit.” He explains that ­although lemons taste sour, eating them leaves a sweet aftertaste in the mouth, which is the effect of enzymes in the saliva. If sweet fruit is used, on the other hand, the tea will be astringent.

Liu has also innovated in terms of the medicinal herbs used in the tea mixture. He has made tea with various herbs including Japanese honeysuckle flower, fishwort, Indian chrysanthemum, golden camellia, mountain litsea, and ornamental eggplant, each bringing its unique flavor and medicinal properties to the beverage.

After nine cycles of steaming and sun-drying, bitter orange tea must be stored in a cool, dry environment for three years to enable the flavor to mature through microfermentation.

In days gone by, strings of bitter orange tea cakes were preserved by hanging them above a cooking stove, but today this is a rare sight in Hakka communities.

Companionship tea

Liu has shared the half-fruit tea that he invented with the Shuiqi Community in Beipu, and they have developed it into “three Hakka herbs half-fruit tea” made with the “three Hakka herbs”: mugwort, perilla, and fishwort. This has become an important commercial product for the community.

Entering the Shuiqi Community Development Association, we see a group of silver-haired seniors at work, with one person responsible for cutting the lemons, two or three others using small scissors to cut through the albedo (white pith) to separate the pulp segments from the peel, and several more concentrating on picking the pips out of the pulp. Liu explains that plant seeds have a naturally bitter taste to deter animals from eating them, and this taste will impact the flavor of the tea, so the seeds must be removed. The extracted pulp and albedo are minced in a blender, and the resulting product is then thoroughly mixed with tealeaves and the three Hakka herbs. Then the mixture is covered with a white cloth and set aside for preliminary fermentation, a step which is known as enzymatic oxidation.

After an hour, the mixture of tea, fruit and herbs has become moist and soft, and scales are used to measure out 20-gram portions, which are pressed into the half-peels that were previously separated from the pulp. When the peels are filled, a round “lid” of lemon peel is placed on top and string is used to bind the final product into a half-ball shape with eight equal parts, thereby completing one “half-fruit” tea cake after another, ready for the steaming and sun-drying process.

In the Shuiqi Community, the “half-fruit tea” (bankecha) invented by Liu Wei-ming has developed into “companionship tea” (also pronounced bankecha), so called because the seniors keep each other company as they sit together making bitter orange tea. But it can also be interpreted to mean “tea that accompanies the transmission of Hakka culture through the generations.”

Liu Wei-ming has shared his “half-fruit tea” technique to enable elderly residents of Beipu’s Shuiqi Community to take part in tea-making activities. This has become part of the community’s microeconomy.

“Half-fruit tea” (bankecha) is a cake of compressed tea made using the peel of half a fruit as a container. Since it has become a medium for social interaction among community elders, it is also known as “companionship tea” (also pronounced bankecha).