Tagged: food safety

Not Every Plant Cut Into a Rooibos Harvest Is Rooibos

A Cape weed common across rooibos country looks enough like the crop to be missed at harvest, and carries a compound the tea plant does not make on its own. Here is what South African chemists traced it to, and what independent testing has actually found.

Rooibos Ferments in the Open, So the Law Makes It Pass Through Heat First

Rooibos is fermented and dried outdoors on bare ground, which is exactly why no batch may legally leave a South African processing plant without a mandated heat step first. Here is what that step actually does, what a 2014 peer-reviewed review found it does not fully guarantee, and why the kettle you already use finishes the job.