rooibos

rooibos, (Aspalathus linearis), shrub of the Aspalathus genus and Fabaceae (or Leguminosae) family, native to South Africa. Named for the Afrikaans word for “red bush,” rooibos is cultivated for its leaves, which are used to make a caffeine-free herbal tea that has often been called “the national drink of South Africa.” The tisane became globally popular in the 2000s. Rooibos received a geographical indication (GI) tag in 2014 and a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) tag from the European Union in 2021.

The scientific name linearis, derived from the plant’s long needlelike leaves, was given to rooibos by the Dutch botanist Nicolaas Burman in 1768. Burman originally classified rooibos as part of the Psoralea genus. However, Swedish professor Rolf Dahlgren persuasively argued in the 1960s that the plant belonged to the Aspalathus genus within the same plant family.

Geographical distribution and physical characteristics

Rooibos grows in the fynbos (English: “fine bush”), a scrubland community in South Africa that constitutes the smallest floral biome in the world, as well as the only biome entirely situated within the borders of one country. The plant is primarily cultivated in the Cederberg range, as well as the Gifberg, Sandveld, and Suid Bokkeveld regions of the country, where it thrives in the arid but fertile soil and sand of those areas’ mountain slopes and plateaus. Its sharp, narrow leaves are particularly suited for efficiently retaining the little moisture available in its environment, as is its lignotuber (the woody thickening around the plant’s stems).

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Wild rooibos is known for its hardiness and resistance to drought; wild varieties take up more space, grow slowly, and can be harvested only every couple of years. Cultivated rooibos does not need irrigation as well, but crop yields are heavily reliant on the amount of rainfall.

The plant’s seeds are distributed by ants during the process of transporting the seeds back to their nests. Since the seeds are hard-shelled, germination often requires scarification, that is, weakening of the seeds’ coats by an exterior force in order to encourage water absorption. In nature, this process typically occurs via fire, whereas cultivators often use acid or physical scarring.

Wild rooibos is polymorphic and hence shows significant variation in the color, shape, and size of its flowers, leaves, and stems. Some specimens, for example, will grow straight up—perhaps as high as 2 meters (6.5 feet)—whereas others extend their branches horizontally, close to the ground. Most of the flowers that sprout on rooibos from November to February, during the South African summer, are yellow, but some are blue. South African plant taxonomist Ben-Erik van Wyk at the University of Johannesburg has divided rooibos into eight categories, but within these categorizations there is a lot of genetic diversity.

Harvesting, usage, and benefits

The type of rooibos predominantly cultivated by the tea industry is the Cederberg region’s Nortier (sometimes called Nortieria), named for the man credited with kick-starting the rooibos tea industry, South African agriculturalist Pieter le Fras Nortier. The Nortier is preferred for the quality of tea that derives from it and the ease with which it can be harvested because of its upright growth pattern. However, it is vulnerable to droughts and pests, leading to uneven harvests. Moreover, global warming has recently reduced the lifespan of the plant, lowering it from a standard 12 years to as few as 5.

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Cultivated rooibos is harvested annually toward the end of the South African summer, after the plants are two years old. Croppers cut off the branches with sickles and take them to factories, where machines reduce the cuttings to a standard size, then sprinkle them with water and bruise them with steel rollers. The bruising releases the sap of the leaves and activates oxidation. The cuttings are then left to ferment, during which time the rooibos acquires its familiar reddish color and flavor. After 12 hours, the rooibos is dried in the sun, sterilized, bagged, and shipped.

The conventional product of this process has a sweet and nutty flavor. Floral notes, as well as those of wood and honey, are detectable. In higher-grade tea, the aromas are more noticeable, and the tea itself is fuller-bodied. It is also more reddish in color. Rooibos is popular because it lacks caffeine, and it is considered a source of antioxidants. The primary antioxidant in rooibos is aspalathin (whose oxidation during fermentation gives the tea its red color), which is also known for its anti-inflammatory properties. Rooibos is also a source of iron, calcium, and magnesium and is low in histamines. The demand for green rooibos, a milder version of the beverage that has not been fermented, has increased over time because of its higher antioxidant content. Rooibos has also seen application in skin care and other cosmetic products.

History of cultivation

There is evidence suggesting that the Indigenous peoples of South Africa consumed rooibos as a beverage prior to European colonization, and they may have also used it as a skin pigment. When Dutch colonists arrived, the expense and difficulty of obtaining tea in South Africa likely encouraged them to begin experimenting with indigenous Cape plants as tea substitutes. Exactly when “bush teas” became common among the colonists remains unknown (as does when they started drinking rooibos specifically), but they were probably drinking them by the mid-19th century. By the 1890s some retail trade had started.

Rooibos tea grew popular enough in the late 1920s that demand began to outpace supply, mainly because of the inability of South African farmers to properly cultivate rooibos; nobody knew how to germinate the seeds. It was Nortier in the 1930s who discovered that rooibos seeds are germinated via scarification.

Rooibos consumption thus continued to grow in South Africa, though its price and social status remained low; many households, including that of rooibos pioneer Oloff Bergh, refused to drink the tea simply because of the accompanying suggestion that they could not afford anything better. When guests visited, Ceylon tea was served instead.

This conceptualization of rooibos tea remained in place until 1968, when a woman named Annekie Theron began promoting rooibos tea with claims that it soothed her baby daughter’s colic. The tea enjoyed a subsequent boom; consumption increased by a third in 1969 alone. Further research led to increased awareness of rooibos’s health benefits, which in turn improved the nation’s pride in the tea. In the 1980s a major marketing push by the Rooibos Tea Control Board, which had been set up in 1954, further popularized rooibos at home and made substantial inroads into markets abroad.

By 1991 rooibos tea was being consumed in South Africa at a rate five times greater than it had been in 1968 (by contrast, black tea consumption had stalled), and the following years saw domestic sales continue to rise, reaching 6,150 tons a year in 1999. International sales surpassed national sales in the 2000s.

In the first half of the 2020s South Africa grew roughly 20,000 tons of rooibos tea every year, a tripling of production since the 1990s. More than 8,000 tons of the annual crop are exported, not only as tea but also as part of alcoholic beverages, baked goods, and cosmetics.

After several years of legal disputes, rooibos received a GI tag in 2014. In 2018 the Indigenous Khoi and San people were formally recognized as traditional knowledge holders for the plant and beverage, leading to them being compensated for the first time. In 2021 rooibos received a PDO tag from the European Union, the first African product to be tagged thus. Only rooibos tea that originates in its traditionally endemic regions in South Africa can now be named and sold as “rooibos” across the globe.