Bittermelon Stuffed With Roasted Tie Guan Yin Oolong Tea

beerandbeancurd coming to the rescue this evening :) Thank you.

I’ve had bitter melon before, prepared at a Chinese restaurant, and it is certainly among the most bitter things I’ve tasted. This tea is nothing of the sort. It’s all roasted tieguanyin with an I-don’t-know-what quality provided by the bitter melon rind.

More aromatic than flavorful. In the nose I get a mix of peppery/nutty/chocolatey/fruity aromas underpinned by smooth smoke and flicks of incense. Body is thin but pleasant. Watery TCM comes to mind but with thin, sweet fruity tastes while also being very twiggy. Ever had Kashi GoLean cereal?

This tea is comforting in a dry and in a sweet twigs and berries kind of way.

I just received a very diverse order from Yunnan Sourcing, my first from them. Pretty excited to slowly work through all of this tea!

The smell coming off of the dry leaves steaming in the preheated pot was just astounding. This tea is worth trying just to smell the toast with strawberry jam pouring off of these leaves.

First short steep (no rinse) was nuts and wheat — if there were Wheaties and Grape Nuts tags, I’d use them.

Second steep poured a MUCH darker brown, but still had a very translucent quality to it. Pumpernickel toast, with its distinct flavors of rye and ferment.

Cooked red fruits, and more of that weird delicious thing that pumpernickel does.

Next few steeps were very consistent: roast, wheat, twigs. Just a hint of watery (not creamy) cocoa, maybe. The wow factor was all upfront, but these last steeps remain delicious and bold.

Anyone else old enough to get this reference? “Talk amongst yourselves. Bittermelon… which is neither bitter, nor melon. Discuss.”

Bittermelon is my nemesis. I love food, I will try pretty much anything, and there are only a couple things I will no longer eat- bittermelon is one. But, here I am…trying a bittermelon stuffed with tea.

Luckily, this tastes nothing like bittermelon. It’s sweet and tastes like a chocolate filled with caramel. Really glad I fought my anti-bittermelon instincts and gave this a try.

First full roasted Tie Guan Yin for me
Sweet, citrusy and a real exotic taste plus nice tingle on my tongue
Definetly good for more than 9 infusions

So I’d been sort of putting this one off for a while for a few reasons.

1) I have lots of other good stuff I’ve been jumping at
2) I thought it would be a pain to portion out
3) I have been made to eat goya many times and have yet to like it.

Today will probably be a short day and I wanted something new so I figured I’d give this a shot. I had forgotten that each portion is actually individually packaged, and the portion I pulled out was a perfect 5g, so I didn’t have to do anything, just threw it in the gaiwan. It smells pretty nice, a bit like bread.

I see that a few people decided to do lower temps with this one, so I figure I’ll give that a shot. After a quick rinse I can smell the roast, and I separate the leaves from the melon a bit. First steep comes out amber and has a sweet and nutty scent.

First sip is smooth and creamy, not too strong in flavor, but I get some toasted sweet rice notes. The second steep is distinctly sweet and chestnutty. The melon in no way takes away from the tgy.

This one carried me through the rest of the day and I definitely enjoyed it!

Man I hate losing tasting notes! Not sure what happened this time. I started recording notes in a text editor since Steepster doesn’t save notes in progress, but I could swear I saved the tasting note and thus thought it safe to delete the one saved in my text editor.
\-_-/
So working from memory…

Steep times: 10,10,15, 30,30, 60, 60.
The leave, both dry and wet, smell amazing! Toasted barley, sweet candy/gummies and fruit.
The taste is so consistent I stopped trying to right anything from steep 3 to 7 which could almost be deemed boring, but every single cup is absurdly delicious. Very robust tastes of chocolate and fruit with a lovely toasty backdrop.
When I initially saw just how much I’d purchased before tasting it I began to worry that I might have made a mistake. Now I think I didn’t quite buy enough.

To start: I screwed up when brewing this tea the first time; you’re supposed to take the rind off. If you have trouble doing that, soaking it in hot water for a little bit makes it peel (which I found out on accident, as I said).
Anyway, a very fruity tea. If you like Upton Tea’s Heavy Baked Ti Guan Yin, this is very similar but definitely does not contain the iron-y taste the Ti Guan Yin does; this tea is magnitudes more mild, but I feel like it does not pair with a lemon as well as Ti Guan Yin does.

This tea is quite good. Despite the name bittermelon, there is little bitterness to this tea. It has a nice sweetness with a slightly medicinal flavor. There is not much roast flavor. I brewed the bittermelon with the TGY for this tea. I don’t really know how to describe the taste of the bittermelon in truth. It is good, it is more sweet than bitter but not a tangerine sweetness. This is a fairly long lasting tea. I brewed it eight times in a small gaiwan. It was not truly finished. Had I wanted to go past eight steeps I could have continued. I don’t in truth know how many steeps this would have gone but eight in itself is a lot for an oolong.

I steeped this eight times in a 120ml gaiwan with 9.3g leaf and bittermelon. I gave it a 10 second rinse and a 10 minute rest. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, and 30 sec. This tea seems to have something of a relaxing qi to it, judging from how I now feel. This is good tea at an excellent price. 200g was only $19.

*Written oct 30th, 2015)

a great tea!
(click link below to see pictures.)

when i smell the leaves/peel dry, i smell melons.

when i smell the leaves/peel wet, i smell fruit and melons.

when i smell the brewed tea, i smell fruit, melons and spices.

when i taste the brewed tea, i taste fruit, melons, slight bitterness (from the bitter melon) and spices.

the color of the brewed tea is a dark amber to light brown.

i rate this tea a 90 because its very strong.

at the moment im heavily calm and relaxed from all the tea i drank today, some call it tea-drunk but id rather not call it that.

many thanks to Scot Wilson and Yunnan sourcing for the lovely sample.

here are some pics from an earlier session

https://instagram.com/p/9d01TJJ464/?taken-by=kirkoneill1988

https://instagram.com/p/9d0vSZJ46s/?taken-by=kirkoneill1988