Sea buckthorn
A vivid orange berry from a thorny coastal and mountain shrub, extraordinarily sour and oily at the same time. It is drunk across Russia, Central Asia, the Himalaya and the Nordic countries, and the harvest is notoriously difficult because the branches are armed.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Hippophae rhamnoides
- Family
- Elaeagnaceae
- Part used
- Fruit
- Origin
- Eurasia, from the Baltic coast to the Himalaya and Mongolia
- Drunk in
- Siberia, Finland, Ladakh, Inner Mongolia
Character
Ferociously sour with a tropical aroma that no northern berry has any business having, and an oily texture that coats the mouth. Always sweetened.
Notes: passion fruit, pineapple, oil
History
Planted for dune stabilisation across northern Europe and China, which is how much of the current supply came to exist. Soviet and Chinese agricultural programmes established large plantations in the twentieth century, and the Himalayan and Ladakhi harvests are much older and entirely local.
How it is drunk
Made into juice, syrup and hot drinks across Russia, Finland and Mongolia, and drunk in Ladakh and Tibet as leh berry juice. In Germany and Scandinavia it appears in cordials and in fruit tisanes.
Production
Berries cling so tightly to the thorny branches that whole branches are often cut and frozen so the fruit can be knocked off. Dried berries keep the colour well and the aroma poorly, so most of the trade is in frozen fruit and juice.
Preparation
Decoction · Infusion
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
What gets confused
Dried material loses most of what makes the fruit interesting. Juice and frozen berries are what the traditions use and what is worth buying.
Common mistakes
- Drinking it unsweetened. It is among the sourest fruits in cultivation and nobody takes it neat.
Related botanicals
- Hibiscus — Ferociously sour infusions that nobody drinks unsweetened, and that stain everything they touch.
Comparisons
- Sea buckthorn vs hibiscus — Two ferociously sour drinks that nobody takes unsweetened, and both stain everything they touch. One is a thorny northern berry; the other a tropical calyx drunk on four continents.
- Sea buckthorn vs barberry — Two intensely sour orange-red berries of Eurasia, both difficult to harvest, and both essentially never drunk without sugar.
- Rosehip vs sea buckthorn — Two orange-fruited northern shrubs gathered for sour drinks, both awkward to harvest and both far better fresh or frozen than dried.
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 Sea buckthorn 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.