The kettle was for rooibos

Rooibos isn’t tea. A guest came over, I asked if they wanted tea, they said yes, and I made rooibos.

The fact has been sitting in my head for a while, but the moment with the kettle and the cups was the first time I said it out loud to someone who didn’t know.

one plant

Every tea you’ve ever drunk came from the same plant. Camellia sinensis. Black, green, white, oolong, yellow, pu’er, all of it the same leaf. What changes is what happens to that leaf after it’s picked.

I find this absurd in the best way. I’d always assumed green tea grew on one kind of bush and black tea on another, the way coffee and cocoa come from different plants. But it’s one bush, and a leaf turns into green or black or white depending only on how someone handles it after the picking.

what makes the difference

Mostly oxidation. How much air the leaf gets between being plucked and being dried.

• White: barely any. Just withered and dried. The Song Dynasty emperor Huizong was so obsessed with white tea that he lost his empire to the Mongols.
• Green: heat-fixed to stop oxidation early. Stays bright and grassy. Pan-fired in China, steamed in Japan. Matcha is the same leaf ground into powder. You drink the whole thing, which is why a cup of matcha is closer to a cup of coffee than to a cup of green tea.
• Yellow: like green, then wrapped warm in cloth to mellow. Almost extinct as a category because the wrap step is too labour-intensive for most producers.
• Oolong: bruised in baskets to control oxidation, somewhere between green and black.
• Black: fully oxidized. The leaf turns dark, the flavour turns malty.
• Pu’er: oxidized and then post-fermented with microbes. Sometimes aged for decades. Traded like wine.

Six tins on the shelf, one plant in the field. The leaves picked from a bush in Yunnan could become any of them depending on what the person processing them decided to make.

the non-teas

So if all real tea is one plant, what’s everything else?

The proper word is tisane. From the Greek ptisanē, meaning barley drink. English calls it “herbal tea” because English calls everything tea. French menus are more careful, listing chamomile, peppermint, hibiscus, ginger, and lemon balm as infusion or tisane, because none of them come from the tea plant.

Rooibos is the famous one. Aspalathus linearis, a South African shrub from the broom family. Only grows in the Cederberg region of the Western Cape. The EU gave it Protected Designation of Origin status in 2021. Same legal protection as Champagne. You cannot grow rooibos in Stockholm even if you wanted to.

Most tisanes have zero caffeine. That’s the useful thing to know when someone asks for “tea” at ten in the evening. They probably mean something that won’t keep them awake. Real tea has caffeine. Rooibos and most herbs don’t.

the one exception

Yerba mate is the tisane that pretends to be tea on caffeine. About 70 mg a cup, same neighbourhood as black tea. South American holly leaf, drunk from a gourd with a metal straw in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, southern Brazil. Not a tea, but not a calm one either. The IARC classifies any beverage above 65°C as “probably carcinogenic”, and mate is typically served at 70°C. So is your tea, if you drink it straight from the kettle.

tea and chai

One more thing I keep coming back to. “Tea” and “chai” are the same word.

Tea came out of China by two routes. The sea route went through Min Chinese ports, where the word was tê. Dutch traders carried it as “tea”, “thé”, “Tee”. The land route went through Mandarin, where the word was chá. So you get “chai” in Hindi, “çay” in Turkish, “чай” in Russian.

Which means a “chai tea latte” is, etymologically, a tea tea latte. I have not been telling this to baristas.

what I do with this

Mostly nothing. Black tea most mornings, rooibos before bed. But when someone wants something hot in the evening, I ask one more question now. Tea or tisane? Caffeine or not?