Rose

History

Damask rose cultivation for attar of roses is documented in Persia from the ninth century, and the technique moved to the Ottoman Balkans, where Bulgaria’s Rose Valley became the centre of world production in the nineteenth century. Drinking rose is a use of the same crop.

How it is drunk

Iranian golab and rose bud tea are household staples. In China rose buds are blended with black tea and sold as mei gui hong cha. Rose water rather than infusion is the more common form across the Levant and South Asia.

Production

Buds are picked before opening, in the few hours after dawn when oil content is highest, and shade-dried whole. Petal grades and whole-bud grades are priced very differently, and the bud is the more expensive.

Preparation

Infusion · Blended with tea

• Herbal infusion (tisane)

  1–2 g/100 ml · 95–100 °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.

Common mistakes

• Steeping buds as long as leaf tea, which draws out a papery tannin.

Related botanicals

• Lavender — Two flowers used sparingly and easily overdone, and both grown primarily for perfume oil rather than for drinking.
• Lavender — Both sold as 'floral tea' with the species unstated, and lavandin is sold as lavender.
• Chinese rosebud — Two rose species from two traditions. The Chinese bud is greener and lighter; the damask is more perfumed and holds a longer steep.
• Violet — Both powdery perfumed florals whose aroma is far more delicate than their reputation, and both lose most of it in careless drying.
• Rose geranium — A leaf that tastes of a flower, used one leaf at a time in the same drinks the flower goes into.
• Rose geranium — Named for the scent rather than the plant. It is a Pelargonium, and the rose it smells of is in a different family entirely.

Teas this connects to

• Earl Grey — Rose is blended into black tea across the Middle East and China, filling a role Earl Grey fills with bergamot.

Comparisons

• Chinese rosebud vs damask rose — Two rose species from two traditions, sold side by side simply as rose buds. The Chinese one is greener and lighter; the Persian and Bulgarian one is more perfumed and holds a longer steep.
• Violet vs rose — Two perfumed florals whose aroma is far more delicate than their reputations, and both lose it to careless drying. Violet has the stranger property: its scent disappears from the nose as you smell it.
• Rose geranium vs rose — A leaf that tastes of a flower against the flower itself. Rose geranium was grown at Grasse precisely because it substituted for rose oil at a fraction of the cost, and it is not quite the same thing.
• Jasmine vs rose — The two flowers most often layered into tea, both enormous on the nose and quiet in the mouth, and from opposite ends of Asia.
• Osmanthus and rose — The two flowers most often used to scent tea outside of jasmine, and a clear illustration that floral covers two quite different things.

Evidence for this page