HONEYBUSH TEA - What I'm Sippy-Sipping Today

I chose Aromatica Fine Teas' VANILLA HONEYBUSH tea today for no other reason than it was described as vanilla. Long my favourite flavor of anything - ice cream, yogurt, cake, lattes, soda, hot chocolate (I still dream of vanilla hot chocolates from The Second Cup when I was growing up, working in the mall) etc, - I was jones-ing for some vanilla comfort today.

This cheery herbal tea has a very sweet vanilla fragrance and a deep amber color, Upon first slurp-sippy-sip (it is still too hot for my poor mouth) I taste sharp, but sweet vanilla. I can tell this is going to be right up my alley! The vanilla warmth is like a bear hug from an old friend (you know who you are Mr. B!)

It's at this point that I usually go through the ingredients to see how I fared in my tasting. Simply enough, VANILLA HONEYBUSH

has just that in it: honeybush, which I have never heard of, natural vanilla flavour, and vanilla bits.

According to Google and Subhuti Dharmananda, Ph.D., Director, Institute for Traditional Medicine, Portland, Oregon, Honeybush (Cyclopia spp.) is indigenous to the cape of South Africa (1, 2). It is used to make a beverage and a medicinal tea, having a pleasant, mildly sweet taste and aroma, somewhat like honey. It has become internationally known as a substitute for ordinary tea (Camellia sinensis). With the dramatic growth in the use of honeybush during the past five years, export of honeybush tea products is now a major industry, following up on the success of another tea substitute from South Africa-rooibos.

International interest in honeybush is traced back to the tea trade of the Dutch and the British. A settlement, which eventually became Cape Town, was established in 1652 as a supply base for the Dutch East India Company that was trading in Indian tea and Southeast Asian spices. Botanists began cataloguing the rich flora of the cape soon after; the honeybush plant was noted in botanical literature by 1705. Though there are no published reports at that time of its use as a tea by the native populations (the San and Khoi-Khoi tribes, known today as KhoiSan or Bushmen), it was soon recognized by the colonists as a suitable substitute for ordinary tea, probably based on observing native practices. In 1814, the British purchased the Cape Colony from the Dutch, and English became the official language a few years later, helping to spread knowledge of South Africa to England and America. In King's American Dispensatory of 1898, under the heading of tea, honeybush is already listed as a substitute, with reference to a report from 1881 indicating use of honeybush as a tea in the Cape Colony of South Africa. The Khoisan of the South African Cape were also using the tea for treatment of coughs and other upper respiratory symptoms associated with infections.

The plant is a shrub of the Fabaceae family (Leguminosae) that grows in the fynbos botanical zone (biome), indicated in green in the map below. It is a narrow region along the coast, bounded by mountain ranges. Fynbos is a vegetation type, characterized mainly by woody plants with small leathery leaves (fynbos is from the Dutch, meaning fine leaved plants).

So there you have it friends, a beautifully luscious AND HEALTHFUL new tea has found a permanent home in my tea collection. I can't wait to order more Honeybush teas from Aromatica Fine Teas. I'm especially looking forward to PUMPKIN HARVEST SPICE HONEYBUSH TEA!