Cranberry
A North American bog fruit that reaches most drinkers as sweetened dried pieces in a red fruit blend, and reaches almost none of them as an infusion of its own. The European small cranberry is a different species, and the northern drinks made from it are a different product.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Vaccinium macrocarpon
- Family
- Ericaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- North-eastern North America — acid bog and marsh from Newfoundland south to the Appalachians and west to Minnesota
- Drunk in
- Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Quebec, Russia
Character
Sharply sour and astringent unsweetened; mild and jammy sweetened. In most red fruit infusions the tartness a drinker attributes to cranberry is hibiscus doing the work, and the cranberry is supplying pieces.
Notes: cranberry, red fruit, tart skin
History
Harvested by the Wampanoag and other eastern peoples before European settlement, and cultivated commercially in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and New Jersey from the nineteenth century. Wet harvesting — flooding the bog and floating the fruit off — is the image most people have of the crop and is a twentieth-century mechanisation rather than an old practice.
How it is drunk
In North America it is a sauce and a juice far more than a drink of its own. In the European fruit-infusion trade sweetened dried cranberry is a standard red-blend component. In Russia and the Nordic countries the related wild berries are made into mors, cordials and kissel, which are cooked drinks rather than infusions.
Production
Most dried cranberry sold to the blend trade is sweetened and frequently oil-coated to stop it clumping, and that changes what it does in a cup entirely: a sweetened, coated piece releases sugar and colour rather than acidity. Unsweetened dried cranberry exists and behaves quite differently.
Preparation
Infusion · Decoction · Cold infusion
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 90–95 °C · 7 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Vaccinium macrocarpon is the American cranberry of cultivation. V. oxycoccos, the small or European cranberry, is a different and much smaller wild species. Lingonberry (V. vitis-idaea) is a third, and is frequently what “cranberry” means on a northern European label. “Bearberry” is used for cranberry in some places and properly names Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, which is a different genus.
Common mistakes
- Reading a red blend’s tartness as cranberry. Check whether hibiscus is on the ingredient list first.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 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 Cranberry 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.