Ingredients · Sweetener

Cane Sugar

Saccharum officinarum · Poaceae (grass family)

Cane Sugar
Sugar, from cane. Twelve products carry it, and it is worth being straightforward about what it is doing: it is there to make the blend sweet in the cup without the drinker adding anything. In the matcha blends in particular, cane sugar is a substantial part of what is in the bag — a sweetened matcha is a latte mix rather than a tea, and that is a reasonable product as long as the label says so.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partGrass
KindSweetener
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromNew Guinea (native range), Brazil (production)
TasteClean sweetness with a faint molasses roundness; it sweetens without adding flavour of its own

How to use it

Dissolved in the cup. In a blend it is measured by the blender rather than by the drinker, which makes it convenient and worth reading the label for. It does not need steeping — it dissolves on contact.

With food

Everything it is sweetening. It suppresses bitterness, which is why it is in the matcha blends.

With spices

Cinnamon. Vanilla. Cardamom. Ginger.

With tea

Matcha, where most of this shop's cane sugar sits. Black tea. Chai.

Its story

Where it comes from

Sugarcane is a grass native to New Guinea, where Papuans domesticated Saccharum officinarum around 6,000 years ago. Brazil led world production in 2022 with 724.4 million tonnes, 37.7 per cent of the total, followed by India and China. No lot origin is named in our notes.

What happened

Sugar's history has to be told plainly, because it is one of the darkest in the whole spice cabinet. From New Guinea, cane spread west with Austronesian voyagers into Maritime Southeast Asia, reaching China and India about three thousand years ago. The earliest known production of crystalline sugar began in northern India. Around the eighth century, Muslim and Arab traders carried sugar from India across the Abbasid Caliphate, and by the tenth century every village in Mesopotamia grew cane. Columbus brought it to the Caribbean in 1493 and the first sugar harvest in Hispaniola was in 1501 — and from there it became the engine of an atrocity. Toil in the sugar plantations became a main basis for the Atlantic slave trade, supplying people to work under brutal coercion. Every sweet thing in European cooking from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth sits on top of that, and it is not a detail.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

Explore

Other ways in

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