Bitter Melon Tie Guanyin - 苦瓜鐵觀音

Several months ago while drinking tea with my friends Jason and Andrew at Smacha, I received (among other things) a little sample of Bitter Melon Tie Guanyin (苦瓜 鐵觀音) oolong tea.

These days I typically choose either an oolong or a hongcha for my daily brew, and I tend to stick with teas I know. But today I was feeling more adventurous so I decided to give this novelty a try.

I was surprised to find the tea leaves are actually packed into a dried bitter-melon rind shaped like a little bumpy cylinder! The leaves themselves look and smell pleasant. It is a roasted oolong tea.

I used freshly boiled water and gave the "unit" a three second rinse in my gaiwan. It smells quite good, roasty, sweet and mellow.

The first infusion was about 30 seconds and poured pretty light. As you might imagine it took the water a few infusions to get into the center of this "wheel of leaves" and start to push the real flavor out. I continued to do short steeps because I was afraid of the bitterness that actually never came. After the second infusion, with the leaves pushing their way out of the melon rind, the liquor turned a medium-dark amber color. I enjoyed the flavor but it does have a weird vegetable note. The sweet caramel-like oolong flavors are muddied up by a tart cucumber-skin aftertaste. 

After 15 years as a heavy tea drinker I have a pretty good understanding of what my body craves. I drink tea for the satisfied feeling it gives me, the flavor, and the energy (qi) (氣). Maybe it's because I do not have any sentimental connections to bitter melon or it's potential health benefits that I found that this tea was ultimately not worth my time.

Good Bitter

In some cases, bitterness means toxicity. Because of this, we humans have evolved to favor sweetness in our food and drink. That is all well and good, but these days most of us have a pretty good understanding of which foods and drinks we can safely consume.

Some people will avoid many wonderful foods just because they have a low to medium level of bitterness. Other people will consume these foods with added sweetener to mask their bitter flavors. In moderation that should be fine, but too much added sweetener may in time contribute to some diseases.

Many healthy foods like tea, grapefruits, and some leafy greens (to name just a few) may have some bitterness, but that certainly does not make them bad. Bitterness is often a sign that the food is high in antioxidants which is a very good thing. I have also read that Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine traditions honor all different flavor profiles and promote the consumption of sweet, salty, sour, astringent, savory and bitter foods and drinks. The key is balance and moderation.

I work in a busy tea house and over the last eight and a half years, I have seen literally thousands of perfectly good cups of well-brewed tea subjected to massive amounts of honey, sugar or artificial sweeteners. I don't want this post to turn into a "bitter rant" (pardon the word play), I only want to suggest that some of us (though probably not many of my readers) are using too much sweetener and thus robbing ourselves of a rewarding natural flavor experience!

I'm not going to lie. I also enjoy sweetened tea from time to time. But I drink over 90% of my tea plain. I sometimes worry about the many customers that I see who are always dumping 3 to 5 (or more) cubes of white sugar cubes into their relatively small mugs of finely-brewed tea. Do they do this all the time or is this just a special treat? Should I ask them about it? Of course not, I should mind my own business.

The Chinese have a saying, "eat bitterness" (吃苦), which is often translated as "the ability to endure hardship." I would like to expand this expression to include its literal meaning as well. Perhaps we should all eat and drink a little more bitterness. If we can't appreciate a food's natural bitterness, then how will we be able to appreciate its natural sweetness?