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Suanmeitang

酸梅汤 (suānméitāng), Beijing

🇨🇳 China Drinks & Soups easy 10 min (plus 1 hr soak) prep · 50 min (plus 4 hr chilling) cook serves 8 glasses (about 2 L) 6 hr start to table ~50 kcal per serving surprise

A plum drink where the plums are first smoked black over a fire. It looks like cola and hits like sour candy with a campfire aftertaste.

Smoking gives savory depth to a fruit that is already intensely sour, hawthorn stacks on more fruit acid, and rock sugar pulls everything back into balance. Sweet, sour, smoky, and faintly salty is roughly the flavor map of a good barbecue sauce, rebalanced into a cold drink.

🥤🔥
The story

Sour plum drinks appear in Chinese records at least as far back as the Song dynasty, but the version everyone knows was refined in the Qing imperial kitchens, reputedly to suit the Qianlong Emperor. From the palace it leaked out to Beijing shops and street sellers and never left.

It is still the capital's definitive summer cooler, sold bottled in every corner store, ladled out at old-brand shops, and simmered at home from herbal-shop packets. Traditional Chinese medicine credits it with clearing summer heat, and it is the standing companion to hot pot and anything spicy.

Fair warning: The first sip lands somewhere between fruit juice, cough syrup, and ash, and most first-timers need two or three sips before it clicks.
The recipe

Ingredients

  • 2.5 L (10 cups) water
  • 50 g (1.8 oz) dried smoked sour plums (wumei)the non-negotiable ingredient
  • 50 g (1.8 oz) dried hawthorn slices (shanzha)
  • 5 g dried tangerine peel (chenpi)
  • 5 g licorice root (gancao)a few slices
  • 10 g dried hibiscus (roselle) flowersoptional, deepens the color
  • 2 g (about 1 tbsp) dried osmanthus flowersplus a pinch to serve
  • 100 g (3.5 oz) rock sugaror to taste; regular sugar works

Method

  1. Rinse the plums, hawthorn, tangerine peel, licorice, and hibiscus briefly under cold water.
  2. Put them in a large pot with the 2.5 liters of water and soak for 1 hour.
  3. Bring to a boil over high heat, then cover and simmer on low for 45 minutes.
  4. Add the rock sugar and stir until dissolved.
  5. Turn off the heat, add the osmanthus, cover, and steep 5 minutes.
  6. Strain through a fine sieve, pressing lightly on the solids.
  7. Taste while warm and adjust the sugar; it should land tart first, sweet second.
  8. Cool to room temperature, then chill at least 4 hours.
  9. Serve very cold or over ice with an extra pinch of osmanthus on top; it keeps 3 to 4 days refrigerated.
Shopping notes
Everything is at a Chinese grocery or herbal shop; ask for wumei, shanzha, chenpi, and gancao, or buy a pre-mixed suanmeitang packet, which is what many Beijing households use. There is no substitute for the smoked plums, though hibiscus from a Mexican grocery (flor de jamaica) covers the roselle.
Cross-checked against: thewoksoflife.com · en.wikipedia.org
Kitchen notes

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