There’s a lot of buzz about the plant known as Aspalathus linearis, but you might not realise it is the scientific name of the South African plant otherwise known as Rooibos or Red Bush. Surrounding a well-understood therapeutic plant with an aura of mystery by using its Latin name feels a bit like the usual woo-woo scam to us, but wait: Aspalathus linearis – that is, Rooibos or Red Bush – is amazing and here’s why.
Apart from having an amazing light, sweet taste that is easy on the palate and which you feel you can drink all day, every day, Rooibos from the Aspalathus linearis has a few secrets too.
Aspalathus linearis is rich in flavonoids, which are believed to be responsible for its reputation for health benefits. Evidence is yet to be gathered that indicates without doubt that dietary flavonoids of the kind found in Aspalathus linearis affect cancer risk in general, but observational studies and clinical trials on hormone-dependent cancers (breast and prostate) have shown benefits. For example, analysis of 14 observational studies that examined breast cancer incidence in 369,934 women found an overall 11% reduced risk of breast cancer with the highest versus lowest intake of some flavonoids.
Meanwhile, a recent review has suggested that dietary intake of flavonoids is associated with a reduced risk of different types of cancer, including gastric, breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer.
The focus of investigations into the health benefits of Rooibos or Aspalathus linearis is Aspalathin, the plant compound that may help protect against free radical damage that leads to conditions like diabetes, heart disease as well as, potentially, cancer.
You can buy Aspalathus linearishere, rather than pay the inflated prices that come with its mystified Latin name at a health food store.
The benefits of Aspalathus Linearis
With its aspalathin, if you’re looking for a naturally occurring substance that can help improve your health, Aspalathus linearis could be a good option for you. Science itself has marked Rooibos and its plant compounds as warranting further investigation. Some of the purported benefits of Aspalathus linearis include:
Reducing inflammation
Improving digestion
Supporting the immune system
Lowering blood sugar levels
There is growing scientific evidence to support these claims and more research is needed
What’s the difference between Aspalathus Linearis, Red Bush and Rooibos?
When it comes to Aspalathus linearis, Red Bush and Rooibos, they are one and the same a plant that is native to South Africa, a naturally caffeine-free, shrub-like plant grown on the Western Cape. The leaves of the Rooibos plant are cut and are either oxidized (fermented), producing what we know as Red Rooibos, or are unoxidized (not fermented), producing what we know as Green Rooibos. Green Rooibos has more aspalathin than red.
Drinking Aspalathus Linearis
If you’re looking for a delicious and healthy drink, look no further than Aspalathus linearis. native to South Africa. It has a refreshingly sweet taste and is rich in antioxidants.
The Rooibos tea that is made with Aspalathus linearis is available here at I Love Decaf and it’s available in eight different flavours:
If you are looking for a flavoursome way to kick caffeine or try more interesting tea that is as refreshing (some say more refreshing) as a cup of ‘normal’ tea, why not give one of them a try and see if you enjoy the taste of health Aspalathus linearis as much as we do.
So, now you’ve gone decaf, how do you overcome the mid-afternoon mountain of doom that is the 3pm slump? The answer is all in the mind or, rather, the brain.
The brain is a brat. Your brain, my brain, your bosses’ brains are all self-obsessed, entitled, lazy bags of porridge comfortable with the high-life and quick fixes. You wouldn’t vote for your brain in a ballot if the only alternative was a brown paper sack of self-aware mashed potatoes.
The brain’s biggest character defect is that it knows its own mind and is very uncomfortable changing it. All those gallons of caffeine it’s been swimming in your whole life, along with the sugar, the processed carbs and all the other quick hits, are what it’s used to. And it wants more. Your craving brain demands you run it a warm bath of cosy slop to hang around in every day.
But you can challenge it. The brat can be changed. You already did by going decaf. A day or so of brain ache and things soon got better. Now it’s halfway through the afternoon and you’re feeling a bit limp, your brain wants you to run the bath as usual. Just once, for old time’s sake.
How to Avoid the Mid-Afternoon Slump Without Caffeine
As obstinate and lazy as a brain is, it’s also easy to out-wit. The best way out of the 3pm slump is a distraction, a change of pace, a new focus. Making your brain work in a different way means it will start making its own good time chemistry without all those artificial quick fixes.
Get out of the office for a breath of fresh air, a bit of exercise. Exercise improves blood flow, helps brain chemistry and is more effective than caffeine at improving your alertness and focus.
Take a break. Sounds straightforward enough, but we don’t mean a sandwich at your desk, take a proper break away from your work environment, take in a view
Fire up your music player with high energy sounds or something you can completely shift your focus onto. We know at least one CEO who goes even further and takes his cello into his office. That’s probably not suitable for a cubicle worker but if you’re remote working, something similar might be the ticket to get away from the grind.
Give in. Surrendering to a crafty nap might be the best thing. We are programmed for the mid-afternoon siesta,and you will definitely feel better and the longer you sleep, the longer it will last. The so-called ‘power nap’ of 10-15 minutes can recharge you for a few hours, while getting in 90 minutes of sleep will allow your brain to experience all phases of light, REM and deep sleep. Deep sleep is where our brains consolidate memory, experience and learning. No wonder that a NASA study found a 26-minute nap improved productivity by over 30%.
Prevention is Better than the Cure
Bad sleep habits like late nights, evening snacking, and staring at screens into the evening can disrupt a night’s rest and can make us tired before we even get into work. Look after the nights and the days will look after themselves.
One last way to avoid hitting the caffeine in the afternoon is to play to your body and brain’s strengths and structure your day accordingly. We are much more mentally alert in the morning and much better at taking decisions, leaving the afternoon to practical matters and dexterity.
Naturally caffeine-free coffee might not strike you as either a worthy subject for a toast or the perfect drink to charge a glass with, but the health benefits of managing the caffeine intake of you and yours could lead to better outcomes and long life. That’s something we can all raise a glass to.
So, with new discoveries in the world of caffeine awareness afoot, I Love Decaf, presents a guide to what’s going on now and in the near future.
Caffeine-free coffee beans: do they mean the end of decaffeination?
Naturally, we are all used to decaffeinated coffee. We know that, given the right beans, grind, roast and decaffeination method, there’s no need to sacrifice the great taste when we ditch the caffeine.
But could the process of decaffeination be side-stepped altogether if a bean was cultivated that had no caffeine in it at all? Coffee cultivation, like all agricultural enterprises, draws heavily on scientific principles – geology, meteorology, horticultural science, biology and botany, but as it happens, there’s no need for all the boffin ‘ologies’. There are already a few half-caff and even some no-caff coffee beans out there in the wild.
Nature beat science to it and that sounds great to us. So, why are supermarket shelves not filling up with naturally caffeine-free coffee right now? Are these naturally caffeine-free beans not suitable in some way for the big time? Is it because of a global conspiracy? Is it the warped manifesto of ‘big coffee’? Perhaps it’s a shadowy Government cabal determined to keep us as busy, wired and panic-stricken as possible? Maybe it just tastes awful, you know, like Nescafé.
None of the above. If anything, its absence from the supermarket could be down to the natural properties of caffeine itself.
Just because you want to kick it out of your coffee, the plant itself doesn’t care about your twitching eyelids or what Kid Barista at Costabucks say, caffeine has a real purpose as far as the plant is concerned.
To find out what that might be, we should look at one the most recent discoveries of naturally caffeine free coffee plants.
Un-caffeinated: the answer to decaffeination?
In the wilder corners of the world, a surprising number of new species of plants and animals are discovered all the time. An average of 10,000 a year. In 2007, however, science busted the average wide open and formally identified over 18,500 plants and animals.
Among all those breakthrough species, described scientifically for the first time, was a previously unknown coffee plant. Between a Welsh, carnivorous, white slug, a bacterium that lives in hairspray and a species of palm that tries so hard for pollination it flowers itself to death, was a naturally caffeine-free species of coffee.
Charrier Coffee – Naturally Caffeine-Free
The naturally caffeine-free coffee plant, Coffea charrieriana or Charrier Coffee, was discovered in the Bakossi Forest Reserve in Western Cameroon and is the first of its kind in Central Africa. It joins an Ethiopian un-caffeinated variety of Arabica and a Kenyan coffee plant – both recently discovered – and 30 out of 47 Indian Ocean Island varieties that are known to contain very little or no caffeine.
Scientists say that the ancestors of Charrier Coffee – like most of its ilk – diverged from caffeinated coffees around 11 million years ago. So far, so good, but at its first listing millions of years down the line, wild Charrier Coffee was given a ‘red’ critically threatened conservation status. A conservation effort is underway, but seeds have also been collected and exported for commercial cultivation in Costa Rica and Brazil.
Those who have tasted Charrier Coffee report it has a much less thick texture than Arabica and has an almost tea-like quality.
What has caffeine ever done for the coffee plant?
Its endangered status might not be purely down to the usual suspects of forest clearance and habitat loss – there could be other factors at play and caffeine content might be just as important to Charrier Coffee as it is to you and me.
Some experts believe that caffeine-containing plants are safer from certain insects, vertebrates, bacteria and fungi, the caffeine acting as a kind of pesticide to protect the seeds. If caffeine has potential to safeguard the plant, caffeine-free varieties grown at scale might offer much lower yields unless they are cultivated higher up mountains beyond the range of insect pests.
Lower yields would mean much higher prices and, indeed, initial batches of cultivated naturally caffeine-free coffee sold at significant premiums.
Caffeine kills coffee plants
The jury is still out on whether caffeine’s pesticidal qualities are really all that, though other species – principally tea and cocoa – have both evolved caffeine content independently of coffee, even though that is apparently a high-stakes adaptation. Experts point to the fact that caffeine is not only a pesticide but also has the potential to kill the very plant that produces it. Caffeine produced in plants is a by-product of other processes and is physically isolated in special cell compartments called vacuoles. Ironically, concentrated caffeine is poisonous to plant cells. Even the coffee tree, it seems, doesn’t want the caffeine and operates a network of its own toxic waste dumps.
One last – and bizarre – theory for the presence of caffeine is that it is there for us and, like many other plants with psychoactive ingredients, part of their success comes from human cultivation. Like honeybees collecting nectar and pollinating flowers, we are in a symbiotic relationship with tea and coffee plants, only it’s us that gets the buzz, while they enjoy the comfort and care of the extraordinary lengths we go to in cultivation.
Half Caff Coffee
Long before Western science started going on species collection to exotic locations all over the globe (and South Wales; remember the slug?) the world knew of naturally low caffeine species of coffee plant. Liberian Coffee is one such species.
Coffea liberica or Liberian Coffee, as the name suggests, is a native of west and central Africa from Angola and Uganda in the south to Liberia at its northern range. It has also become naturalised in the Indian Ocean Islands and southeast Asia and can be found in the Philippines, Indonesia, the Seychelles, the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, and Malaysia.
Liberian is the third most popular bean in the world, but the dominance of Robusta and Arabica beans means it amounts only to around 1.5% of all cultivated coffee. Despite this, its caffeine content – around half of Robusta’s – means that it fetches premium prices on the coffee market. Unlike Charrier Coffee, it still does contain an appreciable dose of caffeine.
If you fancy a half-caff, I Love Decaf has a Halfway House half-caff offering if you’re not sure you want to go the whole hog right away or you just want a little bit of extra go in your juice. Its 50% decaf portion is even produced using the chemical solvent-free Swiss Water Process – another tick towards a healthy lifestyle.
Health benefits of lower caffeine
People who are sensitive to caffeine already have a reason to cut it out; it simply makes them feel unwell. They lose sleep, they have hand tremors, they might even have heart palpitations.
Almost all of us will experience some heart pounding after a coffee binge, so it’s no surprise that – almost to the exclusion of all other caffeine side effects – the heart and circulation are major concerns.
There is a lot of contradictory evidence on the effects of coffee generally on your health. Everyone seems to agree, however, that as a specific stimulant, caffeine does have real effects on your metabolism and by cutting it out, you still get to enjoy some of the positive effects of coffee without caffeine.
Nothing seems cut and dried on caffeine however – as this workshop clearly shows. Before reading that link, you might want to either complete a degree in biomedicine or be prepared to consume a few cups of strong joe to get to the end.
There are some easy takeaways though. It seems that caffeine use is safer sitting down than an hour before you go out for a run or hit the gym. Caffeine and exercise do not mix well with regards to circulation, blood pressure and heart health.
If you are looking after your health, especially if you are incorporating exercise and activity into a healthy lifestyle, the message is clear; it is probably best to keep off the caffeine. Also it’s clear that caffeine won’t help with high blood pressure or hypertension.
There are five ways to decaffeinate, which one works for you?
There is a problem with tea and coffee packaging. It is stricken with an unsightly rash of trademarks and logos erupting from every available surface like zits on a pizza-faced teenager. The blemishes speak of a virtuous product; Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, sustainable, green. Separate info boxes impart details such as strength, bean, roast, blend, grind, carbon footprint and, possibly, USB compatibility. It has made shopping for hot drinks as complex and nuanced as a conference on geopolitical ethics.
We call these little reassuring information panels LoV – Logos of Virtue. They make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
This is one detail you should pay attention to, because how your tea or coffee is decaffeinated is arguably more important
There’s still room on the label – just – so why not add one more detail, the method of decaffeination? This is one detail you should pay attention to, because how your tea or coffee is decaffeinated is arguably more important than many of the other LoVs. For example, with the amount of decaf the world is consuming, how that caffeine is removed has measurable consequences for the environment. Differences in decaffeination can also affect taste and aroma. And the big one; effectiveness of decaffeination varies with each process and if you are buying decaf, it makes sense that you will want it to be as caffeine-free as possible.
The truth is that decaffeinated tea and coffee comes in a bewildering variety of forms but not all are created equal. With a decaf tea or coffee, a lot hinges on the method of its decaffeination. Which one should you choose and why does it matter?
Here comes the science bit
There are five known methods of decaffeination. The original method, which used salt water and benzene is no longer legal because of, well, benzene. In 1906, a chance discovery by German coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius resulted in the world’s first mass produced decaffeinated coffee. Although his coffee later turned out to be carcinogenic, Roselius made up for it all by his involvement in a 1943 plot to blow up Hitler. You win some, you lose some.
Which leaves us four ways of taking caffeine out of tea and coffee.
1. Methylene Chloride Decaffeination
Methylene chloride is bonded to caffeine molecule by molecule by soaking the tea leaves or green coffee beans. There are two methods of achieving this, directly on the beans or leaves in hot water and indirectly, where the beans or leaves are soaked in hot water to remove the caffeine and the solvent is added to the water after the beans are removed. Although ‘solvent’ and the names of most solvents sound quite scary, only the tiniest trace residue will remain on the decaf product and even that will evaporate completely over 38°C/100°F.
2. Ethyl Acetate Decaffeination
Although ethyl acetate hardly sounds much better than the previous method, decaf produced using ethyl acetate as a solvent is sometimes touted as ‘naturally decaffeinated’ because ethyl acetate is a chemical found naturally not only in tea, but also in many fruits. The process is otherwise identical to the direct and indirect methods that use methylene chloride as a solvent. Sometimes, according to learned decafficionados, ethyl acetate decaf leaves a slight chemical taste
3. Swiss Water Decaffeination
This non-solvent alternative decaf process extracts caffeine by a long soak in hot water, followed by filtering though activated carbon to remove the caffeine. The now-decaf water is added back to the drained beans or leaves so that they can reabsorb the oils and flavours. There are a few teas that use the Swiss Water decaf method, but it is most often used for coffee.
4. Carbon Dioxide (co2) Decaffeination
This is the space age version of decaf. This was probably invented when boffins meant to be working on something very clever were momentarily appalled by the state of their decaf and filled whiteboards with obscure formulae and Greek symbols to come up with a solution to the second most important problem before them. We probably won’t have interstellar space travel because of this, but who cares when the decaf tastes this good?
Having said all that, it’s not that complicated. Beans or leaves are pressure cooked with carbon dioxide. In such pressure and temperature environments, carbon dioxide (co2) goes supercritical and becomes a solvent that attracts the small caffeine molecules, leaving the larger flavour molecules intact.
5. Mountain Water Method
Similar in many respects to the Swiss Water decaffeination method and widely regarded as a cut above all other decafs, the Mountain Water Process (MWP) is also sometimes called the Mexican Water Process as it uses water from that country’s highest mountain – Pico de Orizaba.
The process starts with steaming the green coffee beans which are then soaked in a water solution, which removes the caffeine along with the flavour compounds. The water is removed from the seeds and run through a carbon filter that captures caffeine molecules to strain them from the solution. The green coffee is then soaked in all the flavour compounds and reabsorb them without the caffeine.
Ground decaf coffee comes in such a broad range of different forms, the labels display a hot barrow-load of information from decaf method to body, roast and origin. You’re willing to believe the coffee ‘does exactly what it says on the packet’, if only you could work out exactly what it does say on the packet. As well as body and roast, one of the most important bits of information is how fine or coarse the grind is.
How does grind affect my coffee?
Grind is a measurement of how ground the coffee is. That wasn’t a surprise, was it? What might be new information is how much grind affects the taste of the coffee you drink. As well as the coffee you absolutely refuse to drink because it came out with notes of battery acid, warning claxons and flashing lights. If you’ve had one of those cups of decaf recently, you’ve either just come out of Costabucks, or you have got your brew all wrong and that may have something to do with putting the wrong grind in your coffee-making equipment.
Different coffee-making machines and makers make coffee in different ways and at different speeds. To work its magic, your chosen weapon of decaffeination needs a specific size and grade of ground coffee.
Espresso fine grind
Espresso machines, for example, extract all of that yummy super quick – in usually less than 30 seconds. The same goes for pods and capsules. The hot water is in contact with the coffee for such a short time, it needs to extract flavour quickly. A fine grind presents more surface area than a coarse grind and the high-pressure water squeezes more of the flavour out. Using a coarse ground in an espresso machine will lead to a sour cup of under-extracted decaf.
French press coarse grind
A French press, by comparison has minutes to work its magic as you steep the grounds for much longer. Brewing fine grounds in a cafetière for minutes on end will over-extract flavour and lead to a bitter brew.
Between the two extremes, you’ll find that medium ground works best with auto-drip filter machines or pour-over coffee makers, like those that come with a jug or carafe.
Match your machine with grind
It is very important to match the decaf grind you buy with the coffee-making gear you already have. If you suffer from disappointing cups of home-brewed decaf, it could be something as simple as buying the right coffee for your machine.
We try to make this as straightforward as possible at I Love Decaf. Our coffees come in different grinds for different methods of coffee-making. Rather than tell you on the bag the grind is medium-fine, we state what kind of machine the grind is suitable for. Sometimes, to save label space, we use a letter instead.
B Beans (not ground at all)
These are unground beans – perfect if you own a bean-to-cup coffee machine or you grind your own beans separately (perhaps you have a Moka pot and a French press and want to control the grind for optimum results in each piece of equipment).
C Cafetiere/French Press
A cafetiere or French press is a tall jug with a plunger that holds back the grounds from your brewed coffee. You fill it with very hot (not boiling) water and let it steep. When the brew is done you push the plunger slowly down to compress all the grounds out of suspension behind a metal screen.
E Espresso
Espresso machines in the barista-style have become more popular over time, but espresso was originally brewed in Moka pots – stove-top percolators in which you boil water under pressure forcing steam and water through coffee grinds. When the grinds are saturated, the pressure forces brewed coffee up a funnel through a filter to the top chamber. When you hear the characteristic gurgling your coffee is ready. Whatever kind of espresso making equipment you have, this grind is the optimum for brewing your coffee.
P Pods/Capsules
Some modern coffee machines use a sealed pod system to make your coffee. The idea is you throw away each pod after you have used it once and the environmental cost gets picked up in a third world country steadily filling up with aluminium and plastic capsules. Not good enough. Fortunately, you can get refillable pods and systems for most of the proprietary coffee makers. We sell one of these on ilovedecaf, but others are available elsewhere.
F Filter/Aeropress
The simplest method of making coffee is to drip feed or pour very hot water over ground coffee which sits in a cone of filter paper held over a large jug. There are many variations of this technique from pour-over to the new Aeropress machine which can even make espresso-like coffee on the go.
You know how it is; every time you go to the supermarket, you look at the decaf coffee on offer and feel enthusiasm being sucked from your soul. If that sounds like you, then you have tried most of the own-brand decafs already and have come to the conclusion, as we have, that really good decaf is really hard to find in a supermarket.
Many people – cofficianados and consumers alike – criticize own-brand decaf coffee for its lack of flavour, but the real problem is that it has lots of flavours, just not necessarily any pleasant ones. Even the packets remind us of that bloated feeling you get after bad coffee with its flavour notes of cat piddle and warm tyres.
There isn’t a superstore decaf that doesn’t call to mind a warm evening in a fertiliser silo – not one that we’ve discovered yet, anyway.
In fact, if we were supermarket coffee buyers, we wouldn’t go to extreme lengths to preserve the taste. We wouldn’t stick it in foiled bags with re-sealable strips. Why bother maintaining a vacuum when leaving it on the porch in an open jar would at least let the fumes escape?
Our decaf is best
We started I Love Decaf to make the best decaf coffee you can’t buy in a supermarket. We believe that some kinds of decaffeinated coffee are less like a pleasing drink and more like a punishment and we wanted to do something to set it straight. It’s not just the supermarket own-brands either; many major brand coffees miss the mark on their decaffeinated spin-offs.
That’s why asking for the best supermarket decaf coffee is like asking for the most comfortable barbed wire shirt. Just because it’s the only shirt on offer doesn’t mean you should buy it.
Our decaf is best. We started i love decaf to make the best decaf coffee you can’t buy in a supermarket.
You can’t get I Love Decaf in the supermarket
To be honest, we can’t imagine even having a meeting at any of the big supermarket chains, and that’s not just because our MD Mr Roy Bosch (he is also a part-time alligator wrestler and balloon entertainer of some note) has anger management issues with idiots, it’s because we don’t want to sit in their soulless offices drinking their horrible supermarket decaf. It’s best for all concerned if we don’t. That’s not the kind of publicity we need.
Should pregnant mums-to-be go decaf with their tea and coffee drinking?
This isn’t medical advice – you should discuss that with your doctor – but don’t be surprised if you find they think you should at least cut down on your caffeine intake while you are pregnant, as well as when you are breast-feeding.
We already give up so much stuff when we are pregnant; alcohol, all of our free time, like, forever and the ability to lift anything heavier than a bag full of cake. I know, I tried. Of course, cross-fingers, it all turns out great and we get to become a mum, but there are often sacrifices to be made – some are enthusiastically embraced, others, less so.
Then there are the cravings (mine was wasabi peas with custard slices) Mums-to-be cravings range from biscuits and cakes, through to chalk (quite common, it seems) and the smell of tyres. One poor soul reported she had an overwhelming, powerful and relentless craving for something. She didn’t know what, but she did know she really, really wanted it. Fortunately, that passed after a week.
Decaf tea and coffee in pregnancy
Some cravings are less easy to make sense of. For instance, decaffeinated tea and coffee weren’t a bother for me, I could not even face a cup of coffee or tea, decaf or regular, from almost as soon as I got pregnant. It was visceral, almost like it was an anti-craving.
The only hot drink I could enjoy was completely caffeine-free herbal teas. The kitchen smelled like a wildflower meadow at times.
Decaf coffee during first trimester
Caffeine raises blood pressure and pulse and because the first trimester (week 1 to 13) is when the majority of miscarriages happen, you should give caffeine as wide a berth as possible. The generally accepted level of caffeine for pregnancy is around 200mg a day. You’d easily burn through this with just a few cups, but if you still savour the taste of coffee or tea, decaf is the way to go with at least 97% of the caffeine taken out by the various processes of decaffeination.
Another caffeine consideration is that it makes you pee and you risk dehydration from drinking too much regular tea or coffee. Apart from keeping hydrated, you’ll be glad you cut down or quit later on, because if there’s one thing I remember from pregnancy after the first trimester it was a more or less constant march to the bathroom. Nearly all women experience this more as baby grows and the uterus pushes on the bladder.
If you read that and are adamant that you want no caffeine, do what I did and discover the huge range of delicious fruit and herbal teas that have no caffeine in them at all. Some of them may even help with some of the less-pleasant sides of pregnancy like sore tummies or difficulty getting comfortable for sleep.
Try decaf when you try for a baby
If you are trying to get pregnant, it might be worth easing off on the caffeine beforehand, because there are a few temporary withdrawal effects of a sudden cut in caffeine. Mostly, the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal are headaches, fatigue, and irritability. It may be hard to separate some of these symptoms from some of non-caffeine-related side-effects of pregnancy itself, so you might find that herbal tea is the way forward and kill two birds with one stone.
Breast feeding and decaf
The first thing I saw after I enjoyed some skin-to-skin with my eldest, was a steaming cup of tea which I drank while my partner held her. After a few weeks, it was clear she was having trouble sleeping and, of course, that meant I was too. The health visitor advised me to drink less tea and coffee as caffeine finds its way into breast milk and some infants are affected by it. If that sounds like your new family’s situation, you should try what I tried and go decaf. It helped putting her down for sleeps – I was much less ‘wired’ and baby was the same.Caffeine is the world’s most common and popular mind-altering drug. It’s relatively mild and often does no harm in moderation for those who can tolerate it. Your baby, however, is likely to be much more sensitive to its effects than you are. Fortunately there are many options for reducing your caffeine intake by a huge amount and even cutting it out altogether.
Rooibos or Red Bush tea is not, strictly speaking, a tea at all. True teas – from Breakfast to Earl Grey, Typhoo to Tetley and many more besides are all variations on a theme based on a type of camelia, the tea plant. The ‘tea’ leaves of Rooibos (Afrikaans for ‘Red Bush’) are the leaves of a Southern African shrub – Aspalathus linearis – that have been fermented and sun-dried to an autumnal red.
Red Bush Teatime
South Africans have been drinking Red Bush tea for over 300 years, since Europeans settled the Cederberg area of the Western Cape.
There are no records of pre-colonial Rooibos use, but someone must have shown that picking leaves, thrashing them against a rock and leaving them out in the sun to dry was a fantastic idea and not, as logic would suggest, a spectacular waste of everyone’s time.
Green and black tea from India and China were expensive to import for European settlers, so Rooibos taken with milk and sugar (or honey) was adopted as the next best thing. I Love Decaf sells a classic South African Rooibos that has bags of character, is naturally sweet and slightly nutty but – like all red bush teas – contains no caffeine and very little tannin.
White with one lump or two isn’t the only way to drink Rooibos. The sweet, malty notes of red bush blend very well with all kinds of fruits and spices for an exceptional, often sublime, cup of un-caffeinated tea.
A bird in the hand is worth two in a bush, right? If it’s a Red Bush and the bird is the notoriously demented South African Ostrich, things can get out of hand fairly pronto. On the other hand, a cup of this sweet and slightly nutty Rooibos tea is worth more than all the barking mad ostriches you can carry. Stay grounded and smooth, with an earthy caffeine-free drink that makes you unflappable.
The Red Bush Melting (Tea) Pot
As if South Africa isn’t already a global crossroads, Red Bush has some inspirational cross-cultural blending going on. While the colonial powers were moving tea from east to west, Europeans were spreading vanilla – slowly – in the opposite direction from Aztec Mesoamerica to Asia and Africa. Nowadays, vanilla is grown in Madagascar off the east coast of continental Africa, but in the settlers’ time red bush and vanilla was nothing but a wild and fragrant dream. Wake up and smell the vanilla.
A gorgeous and subtle mix of sweet orange and light clove notes make for a naturally caffeine free, delicious and bright infusion with excellent antioxidant properties.
Meanwhile, mixing cool peppermint – often used in North African cuisine – with Rooibos tea grown in the Cederberg area of the Western Cape unites two Mediterranean climates half a world away from each other.
Make sure your everyday is as good as it can be with this delicious tea. Adding a sweet minty flavour to the malty, earthy Red Bush, this tea is perfect for an afternoon pick-me-up or a relaxing evening drink. Get your hands on our 1kg bag of Minty Rooibos tea and enjoy a cup whenever you want.
From pick-me-up to put-me-down, Rooibos is the perfect calming blend. After a hard day shouting at ostriches on the veldt, the Red Bush drinker wants nothing more than to relax into the evening, rejuvenate and wind down for the next day’s ostrich intimidation. Fortunately, Rooibos is versatile enough to mix beautifully with aromatic herbs, fruits and flowers for a soothing cuppa.
Find your perfect night-time tea. This delicious infusion is the perfect partner to help you relax and rejuvenate after a hard day. Blended with soothing Rooibos and aromatic lavender, apple and orange, it’s a wonderfully warming tea that will help you to both relax and rejuvenate. Our Tea Masters add just enough apples to complement the earthy notes of the rooibos, making for a deliciously clean but comforting cuppa with warming aromas.
This winter blend of red bush tea, cinnamon orange, almond cloves and cornflowers is a tea cosy for your mind. An inspiring brew to battle the cold with confidence, so you can go about your day.
We have yet more delicious blends of Rooibos tea on the way, from a pirate-inspired blend of spiciness to a liquid gold infusion as lavish as watching the sun set over the Great Karoo.
Spiced Pirate’s Rooibos Tea
A Rooibos pirate blend that it is one-part ahhh and one-part arrrr! With cinnamon, blackberry leaves, orange blossom, safflower petals, clove buds, cardamom and ginger extract, this treasure chest of Rooibos and spice is a pirate’s punch of flavour where X marks – but T hits – the spot.
All Seasons Luxe Red Bush Tea
A deluxe wrap-around warming blend of Rooibos, with the added spicy tang of cinnamon orange, the sweet, smooth textures of almond cloves and cornflowers. A comforting, tranquil cup for all seasons.
Another Mother Nutty Rooibos
Still naturally caffeine-free, Another Mother is a nuttier alternative to our flagship South African Rooibos infusion. With excellent antioxidant properties and a delicious, sweet orange and light clove character, Another Mother pours as a liquor as bright and rich as a South African sunset.
Approximately half of the coffee grown in the world is produced to make instant coffee. It’s tempting to believe that this fact may be at the root of all the world’s misery, not least because instant coffee, decaf and caffeinated, is both an abomination and an affront to the senses.
An early version of instant, known as Essence of Coffee, was produced briefly for soldiers during the American Civil War and was said to have had the consistency of axle grease. As the French – who can tell you a thing or two about coffee, often without being asked – would say plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more that things change, the more they stay the same. Essence of Coffee was rapidly discontinued, owing to popular demand. It probably helped that its customers were heavily armed.
Less than a century later, during the Second World War, instant coffee had become ever-so-slightly less revolting, and it was American GIs who popularised it wherever they were stationed. The upshot is that, in Britain, instant accounts for three quarters of all coffee sold. That compares to 10% in the US and France and just 1% in Italy.
Fast forward another 80 years and you would think that, with all the advances in drinks tech over the decades, the best decaf instant coffee would at least be passable, but no.
Instant decaffeinated is best avoided
When you consider the pains that the growers, the roasters and blenders go to in selecting varieties of beans to grow and methods of roasting, fine-balancing tastes and textures along the way, it does seem absurd to then throw all of that into an industrial process that values quantity over quality. The best instant decaf is bound to be a shadow of its former self.
Another thing to consider is that instant coffee production is more carbon intensive than simple ground coffee, a fact that the multinational food companies that control almost all the instant coffee market, conveniently omit from their green-wash eco-babble. Ignore all the Aztec and Mayan imagery and sustainability messages printed on plasticized labels and just drink better coffee instead.
Kick the instant habit
In a world where everything seems to be on-demand and instant, we have got used to streaming music and entertainment almost instantly. We’ve gained a lot of convenience but lost some of what makes music and film so special. In the case of coffee, deferred gratification is always better. Serious academic papers have felled a few trees to conclude that the ability to delay gratification can improve a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence. It turns out that patience is a virtue, after all. In other words, a simple cafetiere or pour-over reusable filter is not only easy to use but gets you the best decaf coffee and gets it quick. It may not be instant, but considering the care, craft and ability of the growers, roasters and blenders, three minutes of brewing in your kitchen is not only more sustainable, better for your wellbeing and tastier, but also pretty damn quick.
We should start this article with the advice that there is absolutely zero nutritional benefit in caffeine for children or adults alike. You already know that, and it hardly bears repetition but, at some point, your mini-mes are going to notice you clutching your tea or morning coffee and perhaps be curious about it. They might ask you for a sip and your mind might turn to the emotional wasteland every parent knows as ‘bedtime’.
Last night, bedtime in your house meant that the sweet and adorable kids in your life had turned into junior ASBOIDS, running rings around you. The apples of your eye you previously knew as ‘your children’ were bouncing off the walls like unstable electrons in a reactor core. The mum/dad bomb had already gone critical, and you felt like you could kaboom into next week.
Why would you feed caffeine, even the smidgen left over in decaf, into that chain reaction?
You wouldn’t let them eat a box of chocolate or drink a bathtub of cola before nighty-night-night, so why would you introduce hot drink caffeine at any point in the day?
It is helpful get a sense of proportion. Caffeine is a stimulant that some adults tolerate, and others don’t. It is not morphine or laudanum in that cafetiere or teapot, but a fairly mild, moderately addictive drug. If you’re brewing decaf, it will contain only 1-3% of what a conventional tea or coffee would. Exercising parental care, you might want to allow older children – say over 11 or 12 years old (draw your own line, that’s the point of being a parent) – a few sips of decaf from your mug, provided you feel like sharing a cup of our excellent decaf coffee and decaffeinated tea. But, how about a whole mug of their own?
There’s Not a Problem When it Comes to Decaf Tea and Coffee for Kids
What does this mean in practical terms? An 8-ounce cup of decaf coffee or decaf tea contains around 2 mg of caffeine – about the same concentration that a ready-to-drink chocolate milk might contain. Compare that with a regular cup of black filter coffee, which contains as much as 95 mg and with a cup of black tea that comes in at approximately 25-49 mg of caffeine. A 330 ml can of regular or diet Pepsi, regular diet or zero Coke contains around 34-36 mg of caffeine. A few sips of decaf pales by comparison even to a bar of chocolate which could easily contain the equivalent of ten cups of decaf.
For larger portions – like a mug of decaf, it’s less to do with your child’s age and more to do with their size. The reason why your bottle of Calpol has dosage described in terms of age is because that’s the best safe-side metric of the size of your child relative to a full adult, and dose is always about microgram applied per kilo of human. The same goes for caffeine.
Out there in Greater Parentville, thousands of mums and dads are dealing with bedtimes and bad times and, indeed, it has always been like this, in varying degrees since the year dot. If you are worried about caffeine intake making your little darlings into an unspeakable rabble at the top of the wooden hill to Bedfordshire, you might be surprised that it was the cup of hot chocolate or the bar of Cadbury’s they snaffled on their way home from school that is more likely the culprit. Or the sugar, the e-numbers, or the blue-tinged wakefulness-rays beamed at them from the screen of an iDevice.
