Mulberry fruit
The dried fruit of the mulberry — the same tree whose leaf already holds a page here and feeds the silkworm. Leaf and fruit are separate products with separate seasons and separate trades, and a packet marked “mulberry tea” may be either of them.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Morus alba
- Family
- Moraceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- Northern China for Morus alba; long cultivated across Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia and southern Europe
- Drunk in
- China, Turkey, Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan
Character
Honeyed and mild from white fruit, tart and wine-like from black. Neither has much acidity by the standards of the berries a European fruit blend is built on, which is why mulberry sweetens a blend rather than sharpening it.
Notes: honey, raisin, fig, sweet wine
History
The white mulberry travelled with sericulture, planted for leaves to feed silkworms rather than for fruit, which is why dried mulberry is cheap and abundant in every country with a silk history and expensive in every country without one. In Central Asia the fruit went further than a by-product: dried mulberry and mulberry flour were staple winter food in Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
How it is drunk
In China dried sang shen is simmered with jujube and goji into a sweet domestic drink. In Turkey, Iran and Central Asia dried white mulberry is eaten by the handful from market stalls and steeped in hot water. In Afghanistan and Tajikistan it is also ground into flour. Very little of this reaches a European packet, where mulberry is usually a flavouring.
Production
Mulberry bruises on contact, so the fruit is shaken onto sheets rather than picked, then sun-dried. White fruit dries to a pale straw colour and a honeyed sweetness; black mulberry dries dark and stays sour. The two are graded and priced separately wherever both are grown.
Preparation
Infusion · Decoction · Cold infusion
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
What gets confused
Mulberry leaf and mulberry fruit are different products of one plant and are not interchangeable — the leaf gives a green, hay-like cup and the fruit a sweet dark one. Three species supply fruit: Morus alba (white, sweet, the silk tree), M. nigra (black, sour, the fruit tree of the Middle East and southern Europe) and M. rubra (red, North American).
Common mistakes
- Buying leaf when the fruit was wanted. Both are sold as “mulberry tea”.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Mulberry fruit is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.