Caffeine-Free & Decaf Loose Leaf Tea

The Cape, in the seventeenth century. Europeans brought tea and coffee with them, and colonists short of both looked about for local bushes to drink in their place. One of them they called Honig-thee, honey-tea, for its sweetness, and an 1899 report writes the name down. A visitor in 1902 found bush tea in Cape village stores at sixpence a pound, looking, he said, like the clippings of a privet hedge.

Then somebody checked. In 1870 a researcher named Church made the first study of honeybush's chemistry, and in 1881 he reported that it held no caffeine at all. In 1895 a Cape government laboratory found no alkaloid in what it listed as Honey Tea and Bush Tea. Rooibos is the other Cape bush, cut in the Cederberg; green rooibos, the same plant left unoxidised and made more like a green tea, was developed in 1995 by South Africa's Agricultural Research Council.

The rest of the shelf never had any either. Chamomile is native to southern and eastern Europe, and Hungary grows most of the world's crop of the plant. Lemongrass comes from Sri Lanka and South India, and in Victorian London its oil, shipped out of Ceylon, Bombay, Cochin and Madras, was sold to perfumers as oil of verbena. Licorice is Glykyrrhiza, sweet root. Apple, berries and hibiscus are fruit, and fruit has none.

The decafs are a different thing: black and green tea that had caffeine and had most of it taken out again, with a trace left in the leaf. Rooibos, Organic is the plain red bush and Honeybush, Organic its neighbour from further east. Chamomile, Organic is the flower on its own. English Breakfast Decaf and Decaf Sencha Kyushu Green are real tea leaf, worked on after the fact.