Nannari
The root of a South Indian climber, boiled into a dark syrup and sold as a cold sherbet across Tamil Nadu and Kerala. It is called Indian sarsaparilla and is not sarsaparilla: Hemidesmus and Smilax are different genera in different families that happen to smell alike.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Hemidesmus indicus
- Family
- Apocynaceae
- Part used
- Root
- Origin
- The Indian subcontinent — peninsular India and Sri Lanka, on dry scrub and hedgerow
- Drunk in
- Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Sri Lanka
Character
Sweet, rooty and vanilla-like with a resinous edge — the closest Indian flavour to American root beer, which is not a coincidence given how the naming happened.
Notes: vanilla, root beer, sweet root, wet earth
History
The root’s aroma is close enough to American sarsaparilla that the colonial trade named it after that plant and the two were substituted for one another in the syrup and soft-drink business. That substitution is why the English name exists at all, and it has outlived the trade that produced it.
How it is drunk
In Tamil Nadu and Kerala nannari sarbath — the syrup with lime, water and ice — is a summer street drink sold from carts and small shops, and bottled syrup is an ordinary supermarket item. The root is also simmered into a hot decoction domestically. It is one of the most widely drunk botanicals in southern India and almost unknown outside it.
Production
Roots are dug, washed and dried in lengths; the syrup is made by boiling root with sugar until it thickens and darkens. Most commercial nannari syrup is sugar, colour and flavouring with very little root in it, which is why the bottled and the homemade versions taste so different.
Preparation
Decoction · Cold infusion
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 15 min
What gets confused
Three unrelated roots are tangled here. Sarsaparilla is Smilax, from the Americas. Indian sarsaparilla is Hemidesmus indicus, this plant. Decalepis hamiltonii, swallow root, is a third species also sold as nannari in parts of southern India and is a different plant again. TeaHQ holds sarsaparilla separately.
Common mistakes
- Buying bottled syrup and reading it as the plant. Most of it contains very little root.
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 Nannari 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.