Vetiver
The root of a tall tropical grass, far better known to perfumery than to drinking, and used across South Asia to scent drinking water and to make the green syrup khus. In Kerala and Tamil Nadu a bundle of the root sits in the water pot all day and the household drinks what comes out.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Chrysopogon zizanioides
- Family
- Poaceae
- Part used
- Root
- Origin
- India; now grown across the tropics including Haiti, Java, Réunion and Brazil
- Drunk in
- Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh
Character
Earthy, woody and faintly smoky with a green cooling quality. In water it is barely present, which is exactly the intention; simmered hard it turns bitter and woody and stops being pleasant.
Notes: wet earth, cut wood, smoke, green root
History
Vetiver’s economic weight is in essential oil for perfumery, with Haiti and Indonesia the major producers, and the Indian domestic use of the root to scent water is older and quite separate from that trade. The same grass is planted in dense hedgerows across slopes as an erosion barrier, which is how it turns up in tea-growing districts and in TeaHQ’s own sustainability material.
How it is drunk
In Kerala and Tamil Nadu ramacham roots are dropped into the drinking-water pot or boiled with the water, giving a pale, faintly green, cool-tasting water served all summer. In north India khus syrup goes into sherbet and falooda, and khus tatties — woven screens of vetiver root — were hung in doorways and wetted so that air passing through carried the scent.
Production
Roots are dug from clumps of two years or more, washed, dried and sold in bundles or chopped. The aroma is stronger in older roots and, counter-intuitively, in plants grown in poor dry soil rather than rich — stressed plants make more of it, which is why the best perfumery material does not come from the best ground.
Preparation
Cold infusion · Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 5 min
What gets confused
The bright green of commercial khus syrup is added colour — the root gives almost none. The plant appears under Vetiveria zizanioides in older literature and throughout the perfume trade. Vetiver root, vetiver oil and khus syrup are three products with three quite different relationships to the plant.
Common mistakes
- Boiling it hard and long. The scent comes out quickly and the bitterness comes out slowly.
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 Vetiver 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.