We call it karkade. That's the Sudanese name, and the Egyptian one.
Walk twenty minutes across Western Sydney and you'll find people who call the same flower something else, who learned to make it a different way, from a grandmother in a different country, and who are just as certain that it belongs to them.
They're all right. That's the interesting part.
The same flower, everywhere
It's Hibiscus sabdariffa. What gets dried and steeped isn't the petal but the calyx, the fleshy cup that holds the flower after the bloom drops. It grows across the tropics and the subtropics, and wherever it grows, people worked out you could make a red drink out of it.
Karkade. Sudan and Egypt. Poured cold, sweetened, and put in front of anyone who walks through the door. At weddings it's served in glass jugs and there's always more coming.
Bissap. Senegal, Mali, and across West Africa. Often with mint, sometimes with orange blossom water, and sold in small bags on the street frozen into a block you bite the corner off.
Agua de Jamaica. Mexico and Central America. One of the aguas frescas, sitting in a glass barrel next to the horchata and the tamarindo. You say it ha MY ka, and it's got nothing to do with the island.
Sorrel. Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Caribbean. Made at Christmas with ginger and cloves and often a good measure of rum. If a Trini tells you sorrel is a Christmas drink they aren't talking about the leafy green herb of the same name.
Roselle, or rosella. Australia. Grown in Queensland and northern New South Wales, and here it mostly ends up as jam, or as the little flower in a bottle of sparkling wine. Australians have been growing this plant for well over a century and largely decided it was a preserve rather than a drink.
Zobo. Nigeria. Karkanji. Chad and Niger. Chai kujarat. Iran. Luo shen hua cha. China and Taiwan.
Hot or cold
We pour it cold. That's how it's drunk in Sudan and it's what we make, made with cold water overnight and served over ice.
But plenty of people drink it hot, and they aren't doing it wrong. In Egypt it goes both ways depending on the season, hot through winter and cold through summer. In Iran and across parts of North Africa it's a hot cup. In Taiwan and China it turns up as a hot tea.
Same flower, same calyx, two different habits. If you've only ever had it one way, try the other. It's a different drink.
Why that matters here
Australia is one of the few countries on earth where all of those people live on the same street.
There are Sudanese, Egyptian, Somali, Eritrean, Senegalese, Nigerian, Mexican, Salvadoran, Jamaican and Trinidadian families across this city, and every single one of them already knows what this drink is. They don't need it explained. They need to be able to find it.
That's a very unusual position for a drink to be in. Most new products spend years teaching people what they are. This one arrives already understood by hundreds of thousands of Australians, and merely unfamiliar to everyone else.
And the everyone else part isn't a problem either. Nobody has to be told what it is once they've seen a glass of it. The colour does the work.
What we're trying to do
We aren't introducing Australia to some new superfood. We'd rather not use words like that at all. We're bringing across a habit.
In Sudan karkade isn't special. That's the whole point. It isn't a wellness product or a trend, it's what's in the fridge, the way cordial is in the fridge here. It gets poured for a guest, for a kid after school, on a hot afternoon for no reason at all.
A drink becomes a household name by being ordinary. Iced tea, ginger beer, lemonade. None of them win by being remarkable. They win by being there on a Tuesday.
So the goal isn't to make karkade exciting. It's to make it normal.
This is a series
We're going to keep writing these. How bissap is made in Senegal and why the mint isn't optional. Why Caribbean sorrel is a Christmas drink. What Mexican aguas frescas get right that we could learn from. And the Australian rosella growers we've been talking to, who are doing something difficult on a very small scale.
If this is your drink under another name, we'd like to hear how your family makes it. Tell us at a market stall or email drinkkarkade@gmail.com. We'll put the good ones in here.
And if you want to make some, we sell it dried by the bag. Here's how we make ours.
What are you after?
- Six packs, from $21, delivered across Sydney.
- Dried hibiscus, posted Australia wide.
- Catering for a club day or event.
- Wholesale for cafes, shops and grocers. If you run an African, Caribbean or Latin grocer, we'd like to talk.