Rooibos Keeps Turning Up in Detective Fiction, Now on Apple TV+

If you drink rooibos and read crime fiction, you have probably met your tea on the page before. The red bush has a quiet habit of turning up in detective stories, and this week it earned a spoken line on the Apple TV+ thriller "Down Cemetery Road."

In the third episode, "Filthy Work," adapted by Morwenna Banks from Mick Herron's 2003 novel, Wigwam, the neighbor that private investigator Zoe Boehm (Emma Thompson) is questioning, offers her a cup of rooibos tea, a quiet pause in the middle of a tense scene. The series, which also stars Ruth Wilson as art restorer Sarah Trafford, follows the pair after an explosion and a child's disappearance disrupt a quiet Oxford suburb.

It is not the tea's first turn in the genre. Rooibos surfaces in Alexander McCall Smith's "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" novels and in the crime novels of Deon Meyer, both examples flagged by Adele du Toit, a spokesperson for the South African Rooibos Council. She called the Apple TV+ moment "not just a drink, but a symbol of South Africa's unique biodiversity and the growing global embrace of our homegrown flavours."

Rooibos, the caffeine-free tisane brewed from Aspalathus linearis, grows only in South Africa's Cederberg region. It is sold abroad as "red bush tea" or "red tea," chiefly in Europe, North America, and Japan.

Sources: South African Rooibos Council, "Rooibos Scores a Cameo in Global Apple TV+ Hit 'Down Cemetery Road'"; "Down Cemetery Road" S01E03, "Filthy Work," episode transcript, Scraps from the Loft.