Ume
The fruit of the tree whose flower already holds a page here as plum blossom — one plant, two products, harvested half a year apart. The fruit is never eaten raw: it is salted, syruped or smoked, and each of those makes a different drink in a different country.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Prunus mume
- Family
- Rosaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- Southern China; long cultivated in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan
- Drunk in
- Wakayama, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan
Character
Extremely sour in every form, and then whatever the preparation added: salt in umeboshi, sugar in maesil-cheong, smoke in wu mei. The syrup version is the one closest to an ordinary sweet drink.
Notes: sour plum, apricot, smoke, brine
History
The tree reached Japan from China early and the flower and the fruit acquired separate cultural careers there — the blossom as a subject of poetry and the fruit as a preserving crop. Wakayama is the reference Japanese production area for the fruit. The three great preparations, umeboshi, umeshu and the smoked Chinese wu mei, each have their own history and are not variants of one practice.
How it is drunk
In Korea maesil-cha is a syrup preserve stirred into hot or cold water rather than a steeped infusion. In Japan umeboshi is dropped into hot water or into green tea as umecha, and umeshu is a steeped liqueur. In China smoked wu mei is the base of suanmeitang, the dark sour summer drink. Four countries and four preparations from one fruit.
Production
Green fruit is picked in early summer and processed immediately. Salting draws water out under weight over weeks and produces the brine that becomes umezu; the syrup method layers fruit with sugar and takes months; the Chinese smoked form is dried over fire until black and hard. None of these is drying in the ordinary sense.
Preparation
Infusion · Cold infusion · Decoction
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 90–95 °C · 5 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Called both plum and apricot in English and being neither: Prunus mume is its own species, closer to apricot than to plum. Plum blossom and ume fruit come from the same tree and TeaHQ holds them as separate records because they are separate products with separate trades.
Common mistakes
- Treating maesil-cha as an infusion. It is a preserve spooned into water, in the same way that yuja-cha and mogwa-cha are.
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 Ume 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.