New Jersey tea
A small eastern North American shrub whose dried leaf was the best-regarded of the American substitutes for imported tea. It is a substitute rather than a herb in the ordinary sense: dried and infused it gives a brown, faintly tannic cup that reads to a tea drinker as a weak black tea rather than as a tisane.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Ceanothus americanus
- Family
- Rhamnaceae
- Part used
- Leaf
- Origin
- Eastern and central North America — dry prairie, open woodland and rocky slope
- Drunk in
- New Jersey, New England, Great Lakes, Ontario
Character
Dry, brown-tasting and mildly tannic with very little aroma — the closest thing in this catalogue to a weak, slightly stale black tea. That resemblance is exactly why it was chosen and why the other liberty teas were not.
Notes: dry leaf, hay, faint tobacco
History
The name is conventionally attached to the boycotts of imported tea in the 1770s, and the plant was in use among peoples of the eastern woodlands before that. Like most liberty-tea attributions the 1770s dating is repeated in later accounts rather than fixed by a contemporaneous source, and TeaHQ states it as convention rather than as record.
How it is drunk
Now a forager’s and native-plant gardener’s drink in the eastern United States, sold by nurseries as a shrub far more often than by anyone as a leaf. It is a plant with a large historical profile and almost no commercial presence, which is an unusual combination in this catalogue.
Production
Leaves are taken in flower and dried. Several accounts describe bruising and oxidising them in the manner of black tea before drying, which darkens the cup considerably; simply air-dried leaf gives a paler, greener and more astringent drink.
Preparation
Infusion
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 90–95 °C · 5 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.
Caffeine: None. It resembles black tea in colour, body and tannin and not in this respect, which is the one property a substitute could not supply.
What gets confused
“Redroot” is also used for Amaranthus species and for Lachnanthes caroliana; the Ceanothus root really is red and gave the shrub the name. Several other Ceanothus species were used regionally in the same way, particularly in California, and none of them is this one.
Common mistakes
- Expecting a herb. It behaves like a weak tea, including going astringent when pushed.
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 New Jersey tea 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.