Allspice
The dried unripe berry of a Caribbean myrtle, named in English for tasting like several spices at once. Jamaica supplies most of the world’s crop and has done since the seventeenth century, and attempts to grow it elsewhere have mostly failed.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Pimenta dioica
- Family
- Myrtaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- Jamaica, southern Mexico and Central America
- Drunk in
- Jamaica, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras
Character
Warm and clove-dominant with cinnamon and nutmeg behind it, which is exactly what the English name promises. Closer to clove than to anything else and softer than clove is.
Notes: clove, cinnamon, nutmeg
History
Encountered by Spanish voyagers who took it for a kind of pepper — hence pimenta and the English pimento. Jamaican cultivation has dominated the trade since the seventeenth century, and the tree is notoriously difficult to establish outside its range because it needs both sexes and a specific climate.
How it is drunk
Central to Jamaican jerk seasoning, where the wood is also used for smoking, and to Caribbean sorrel drinks at Christmas. It appears in Middle Eastern cooking, in northern European baking and in mulled drinks across the continent.
Production
Berries are picked green and unripe, since ripe ones lose most of the aroma, and sun-dried until brown and hard. Whole berries keep their character for years and ground allspice fades quickly.
Preparation
Decoction · Steeped with milk · Blended with tea
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 5 min
What gets confused
Not a blend, despite the name — it is a single berry. Ground allspice is frequently bulked with cheaper material and fades fast either way.
Common mistakes
- Assuming it is a mixed spice. One tree, one berry, three flavours.
Related botanicals
- Nutmeg — Warm resinous spices that taste of several others at once, and both fade almost immediately once ground.
Teas this connects to
- CTC black tea — The clove-dominant spice in Caribbean spiced teas and sorrel drinks, and a fixture of European mulled preparations.
Comparisons
- Nutmeg vs allspice — Two warm resinous spices that taste of several others at once, and both fade almost immediately once ground. Both were fought over by European powers, and only one of them travelled successfully.
- Allspice vs clove — The closest pair in the spice cabinet, and allspice is the softer of the two. Both are Myrtaceae, both are dried unopened plant parts, and clove is roughly three times as assertive.
- Juniper vs allspice — Two aromatic 'berries', neither of which is a berry, both used in mulled and spiced drinks and both needing to be crushed or bought whole to be worth anything.
- Clove vs allspice — Two Myrtaceae from opposite hemispheres carrying the same dominant clove note, and allspice is by a clear margin the one you can afford to be generous with.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. Twenty of the 150 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Allspice is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.