ROY BUS

I haven't posted in a few days due to a family emergency that is resolving itself, but still took a lot out of us.

Amid all the rushing around, I found a new thing to add to my list of a few of my favourite things. It's not new to many people. It's been popular here for a few years, and it's been a traditional drink in Africa since long before the Afrikaners gave it its name , but I had not tried rooibos (Afrikaners for red bush) tea until a few nights ago. I was expecting it to taste like a strong herb drink, or perhaps very close to black tea, but it really has a nice floral, slightly medicinal taste. Some people think it tastes nutty, but I didn't really pick that up. Of course, the devoted tea drinkers in our family dislike it. It's close enough to a traditional tea to taste odd to them.

After my first few sips, I thought I had found the answer to my "tea drinking problem". The water here is very hard and can smell funny. I still drink a lot of water, but I can understand why I am the only one that drinks much of it straight from the tap. Yet, I am not a big tea drinker. I am really sensitive to tannins (I can't drink most red wines without having strong stomach pains). Once in a while I will have a cup of Darjeeling, green, or white tea. I just am not that into it. I love my coffee, but I cannot replace water with coffee. Buying bottled water is really out of the question.

So, trying not to get my hopes up too much, I looked into what could be the effects of drinking a lot of rooibos. I stumbled upon a very interesting story to a pretty amazing plant.

The Cederberg Mountains aren't hospitable to most plants. It's dry, the soil is poor, and it's hot in the summer. The rooibos plant (a type of legume) thrives here, due in part to its extremely long taproot. However, it seems that rooibos is perfectly adapted to this region, because all attempts to cultivate this plant outside this region have failed.

The Khoisan drank a tea from the needles of the rooibos plant, and when the Dutch settled in the area, they adopted this infusion to avoid the high price of imported black tea. However, its use wasn't very widespread until a Russian immigrant named Benjamin Ginsberg decided to try to market the drink more widely in the region. This eventually lead to the Eleven O'Clock brand of red bush tea.

During his attempts to cultivate the plant, Ginsberg inadvertently lead to the reduction in the size of the seed of the plant, making it very difficult find seeds to replant the crops. The price soon soared to over £80 for a pound of the sand-like seeds. One woman seemed to consistently deliver large quantities of the seeds, and Ginsberg finally convinced her to reveal her source. She had found that ants would take the seeds to their nests, and by breaking into these nests, she could find large quantities of seeds in one place. The seeds are now collected through a mechanical process.

Rooibos has been used in South Africa to treat skin conditions, allergies, colic, and asthma. Due to its high anti-oxidant content, it may be shown to help slow or stop cancer growth. There's a whole laundry list of diseases that may be treated with this plant (depression, headaches, insomnia, urinary system problems, stomach spasms), and as of yet, no adverse effects have been shown.

If you're really used to and attached to black tea, this tea might be a bit hard to adapt to having as a replacement. In South Africa, it's prepared with milk and sweetener (and that's how I make it), but in other parts of the world, it's usually consumed black and with or without sweetener. It has a natural sweetness that might be enough for some people. Overall, I find it to be a nice, comforting drink, and I urge you to give it a try.

My new Senseo machine

Senseo machines have been sold in the US for a few years now, and there's really not much more you can say about them. Or so you'd think. Most people probably haven't tried coffee from these machines. Whether it's because the pods aren't sold everywhere and are expensive, or that the single serve machines are competing against more practical and much of the time cheaper automatic drip coffee pots, many people I've mentioned them to have never had a cup of Senseo coffee. Philips was likely trying to address this problem when they handed out a bunch of free machines to people across the country during the past year. I had signed up to be considered and forgot about it. Eventually, I got my machine, and making good on my promise to them, I am telling people about it.

First, if you are looking for cheap coffee, Senseo isn't for you. The pods for the machine cost anywhere from $0.25-$1.00 and you have to use two for most mugs of coffee. There are some refillable pods you can buy, but they seem messy. Much messier than automatic drip coffee makers with the potential to turn your entire kitchen into a disaster area if they cause the machine to pop open during brewing. And even with refillable pods you are using more coffee than you would for automatic drip, press posts, or other coffee making methods.

Secondly, if you are looking for really high quality coffee, the Senseo isn't for you. I've only tried the "Senseo" brand pods made by the Dutch coffee company Egbert Douwes. Two flavours came with my machine, "French Vanilla" and "Medium Roast". I later purchased "Dark Roast". The medium roast had the very bitter quality of high Robusta content. It also lacked any depth to the taste. Bitter was about it. The french vanilla was passable. I dislike pre-flavoured coffees, but this was actually drinkable and the flavouring masked the bitterness. The dark roast was also better than the medium roast, but was still bitter. I have some Sumatra blend on order, a coffee promised to be 100% Arabica. I am not expecting high quality, but if it is anything better than poor, I will be sure to update this entry.

Again, I could buy my favourite coffee and fill refillable pods, but I don't think it's just the quality of the coffee that is flawed. This machine makes coffee very fast with water that isn't super hot. I don't think the coffee has the chance to really brew. Then there's the foam. To Philips this is a selling point. It's not crema. It doesn't taste like crema or behave like crema. Instead of being slightly oily and delicate like crema you get from esspresso or even in press pots, this stuff is dry and never goes away. You can stir it for 10 minutes and it will still be stiffly bubbly and staring up at you from your cup. I can't imagine why someone would think this is appealing. Maybe it's a visual thing. To me, it's a bit unnerving.

After years of making coffee in press pots (and dealing with that mess) and never really finding a replacement for my Braun coffee pot, I really wanted to love this product. The machine itself is very stylish, but it's got a huge footprint. It also needs enough vertical clearance to load the pods. Filling and cleaning really is easy and I doubt it'd ever produce a cup of coffee with that stale coffee taste that some coffee pots get even with the most diligent cleaning. Premeasured pods, while expensive, take the human error factor out of coffee making. And admittedly, even the highly bitter coffee this machine produces is better than instant.

If you are the only coffee drinker in the house and you find yourself reaching for instant more often than brewing a pot of coffee that sits there to be mostly tossed out after a few hours, then this is probably a great product for you. You may, however, want to check out the tcups instead. While not as well known as pods, you can order tcups from Green Mountain Coffee and Coffee People as well as smaller coffee roasters.