How Red Drink Has Endured and Evolved

It was less than 20 years after Christopher Columbus accidentally happened upon the islands of the Caribbean that the first Spanish ships began transporting precious cargo across the Atlantic: sugarcane, and captive Black and Brown bodies from Africa (and, in the earliest days, India) to farm it.

The navigator had guessed correctly that the climate of the islands would be suitable not just for sugar but for any number of foods and spices traded at high cost on the ancient silk routes into Europe from Asia and Africa. These included mangoes, bananas, oranges, cinnamon, ginger, clove, and more.

In the Caribbean, [the roselle hibiscus] remained a signifier of lost homelands …

On one of those countless ships, among the many barrels and sacks, at a time lost to history, the roselle hibiscus plant made its way to the islands. In the lands where it was most commonly consumed—India, the Middle East, and Africa—the naturally sour flowers were brewed with cinnamon, clove, ginger, and sometimes mint, into a ruby-colored elixir. In the Caribbean, it remained a signifier of lost homelands—not just because of the roselle itself, but in the mix of sugar and spices transported in the so-called Columbian Exchange that moved people, plants, and animals between the earth’s hemispheres.

Our folklore tells us that the first sorrel maker was Anansi, the trickster spider, a character from the Akan storytelling tradition. Anansi traveled from Ghana to the Caribbean with enslaved people, and was adapted based on local traditions. Anansi, the story goes, steals a stalk of roselle hibiscus, flings it into a pot of boiling water with sugar and spices (including a native Caribbean addition, allspice), and tries to pass it off as wine. When villagers don’t believe him, Anansi cries, “It is so real!” What they hear is “It’s sorrel,” and so the drink and the name were born.

The truth of the name is a darker story. As violence stripped enslaved people of their cultural identities and languages, the drink called bissap in Senegal, zobo in Nigeria, and zobolo in Ghana became known as “sorrel,” a pidgin form of roselle.

Despite a new name, its importance remained among the enslaved and, later, free Caribbean communities, where it was used as one of various libations in the worship of the orisha—the West African nature deities. Red is a powerful color in this religious practice because it represents blood and vitality. At some point, the clear rum also used for these libations combined with sorrel, becoming a cocktail for significant occasions like Christmas.

While we know the original regions where roselle hibiscus—or Hibiscus sabdariffa—was grown and consumed, its precise native habitat remains unclear. On this side of the world, the island of Jamaica was almost certainly the first landing point for roselle hibiscus plants or seeds. From the late 15th century and well into the 19th, Jamaica was one of the most profitable colonies of first Spain and then England. Imports and exports to the island were extensive and constant. But the best clue is in the name: In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, sorrel is called flor de Jamaica or “flower of Jamaica.” “Jamaica flower” was, in the period, a common English term for it as well.

When the Anglo-Irish botanist and physician Hans Sloane visited Jamaica in the late 1600s, sorrel was well established in island gardens. He wrote that it was used in tarts, jellies, and wine. By the time Janet Schaw, a Scottish society woman who traveled to the Caribbean in 1776, wrote in her travel journal about the various fruit tarts on Antigua, which she called “remarkably fine,” she also said that “the best I ever tasted is a sorrel, which when baked becomes the most beautiful Scarlet, and the sirup round it quite transparent.”

Sloane and Schaw were not the only visitors to comment on sorrel. Travelogues through the centuries account for a red drink made from the flowers that could do everything from cool fevers to reduce agitated states. Modern science tells us that sorrel may reduce blood pressure and have anti-inflammatory and antibiotic properties. Caribbean people have long used sorrel for these and other purposes.

The fascination with sorrel continued into the early 20th century. A 1909 paper from the Torrey Botanical Society in the Bronx tried to solve the mystery of sorrel’s origins, noting that it was by then being grown in Florida and California—most likely for a secondary use as plant fiber. According to the paper, Australia also had vast sorrel farms for the purpose of making jelly specifically for export to England.

Sorrel is often called the original “red drink” in the Soul Food cuisine of the American South, but most of the evidence of sorrel consumption in America is around the arrival of West Indian immigrants in the early 1900s. Even then, we only find it in family histories, rather than commercial use. In those days, someone had to bring sorrel to you after a visit to the Caribbean. That was still true when my father arrived here from Trinidad in 1954.

In the last 12 years, bartenders have come to know an elegant form of this heritage Caribbean drink in Sorel, the liqueur made by Jackie Summers …

In the last 12 years, bartenders have come to know an elegant form of this heritage Caribbean drink in Sorel, the liqueur made by Jackie Summers (whose mother’s parents emigrated from Barbados) and his company, Jack From Brooklyn. Made with roselle flowers from North Africa, Sorel is the most awarded liqueur in American history, with more than 200 accolades in the gold or better category. It’s a smooth, complex brew that subtly and consistently marries the flavors of traditional sorrel without the home-brewed inconsistencies that can make it too sweet or sour, or too heavy on certain spices.

Did “red drink” independently evolve from local American ingredients for use in West African worship rituals? Or were enslaved people who originated in the Caribbean trying to approximate sorrel with what they could find here in the United States? As of now, the historical record hasn’t yielded the answers.

What we do know is that from the lands where Europeans stole sorrel—Africa and India—they also stole its people. But, like them, sorrel persisted, releasing its garnet hue into the waters of the libation cup, or the medicine man’s tisanes. Sorrel sustained us through centuries, and continues to do so—every sip telling the five-century story of a people who survived.