Tagged: cutting

The Night Shift Behind Your Calm Cup

The bedtime cup is effortless, but getting it there is a precisely timed operation. Here is what actually happens to the red bush between the field and the packet, including the overnight fermentation window that decides whether a batch tastes right.

Superior, Choice, Standard: How a Rooibos Grade Is Judged, and Why a Finer Cut Tastes Stronger

Every batch of rooibos is graded on cut, colour, and aroma before it becomes a teabag, a loose-leaf tin, or an extract. Here is what Superior, Choice, and Standard grade actually describe, and why a finer cut tastes stronger while a coarser one tastes sweeter.

The Cut That Used to Take All Day

Cutting a rooibos harvest into tea once meant an axe and an entire day's work by hand. Here is how that job passed from a worker's own arm, to one family's private farms, to a single government board that owned the only legal cutting operation in the country, and finally, only in the last two decades, to the growers themselves.