Bitter Orange Tea, a Hakka fruit tea that is good for health, is made from Hutou Gan, a kind of orange Taiwanese people consider auspicious due to its large size and beautiful color. Despite the fact that Hutou Gan is widely beloved as a household ornament during Chinese New Year, its fruits are so bitter that that no one seems to be able to swallow it directly. For that reason, it often gets thrown away after the fruits have shriveled.

However, the ingenious Hakka people take it as an opportunity to make something out of those discarded oranges. They remove the sour fruits and put tea leaves, perilla, and licorice in the emptied rinds. After about half a year of steaming, processing, roasting and sunning, Bitter Orange Tea is finally completed.

The tea can be had after bitter oranges are put in a teapot full of hot water. It has a bittersweet taste originating from both tea leaves and bitter oranges. Thanks to its herbal ingredients, namely perilla and licorice, it is said to possess tremendous health benefits, such as curing coughs, phlegm, or fever.