Tagged: wupperthal

A 1933 Tea Sample Still Matches Today's Cup

A 2019 chemical analysis of thirty-seven tea samples set aside in 1933 found that the fingerprint of that decades-old rooibos and a commercial tea from 2016 are virtually identical, and it finally identified a forgotten reed tea from the same box as a completely different plant still drunk today at Wupperthal.

Almost Every Cup of Rooibos Comes From One Plant, Picked in the 1930s

Wild rooibos grows across roughly 600,000 hectares of the Cederberg and Bokkeveld as at least four genetically distinct types. Nearly every cultivated bush you have ever steeped descends from just one of them, selected in the 1930s, and the wild relatives that did not make the cut are still out there, mostly untasted.

The Board That Owned Rooibos for Forty Years

From 1954 to 1993, one government board was the only legal buyer and the only legal seller of rooibos in South Africa, and it built that monopoly on a rule that quietly shut coloured growers out. Here is how that came to be, and what it left behind.