Tarragon is the one kitchen herb that tastes sweet before it tastes savoury — which is how it ended up in a bottle. The botany behind the anise note, the herb's long life as a green soft drink, and how our 1 L Tarhun ferment is made.
Crush a tarragon leaf between your fingers and the smell arrives before you have decided what it is. Aniseed first, then something greener and drier underneath, closer to cut hay. It is one of the few kitchen herbs that reads as sweet before it reads as savoury, and that is the whole reason it ended up in a bottle and not only on a plate.
What tarragon actually is
Tarragon is Artemisia dracunculus, a perennial in the daisy family, Asteraceae. Its close relatives are the bitter ones — wormwood, mugwort, southernwood — and tarragon is the mild, sociable member of that family. You can see the kinship in the plant: the same wiry upright habit, the same thin branching stems. But where its cousins carry grey felted foliage, tarragon has narrow, smooth, glossy leaves, almost willow-like, growing to about a metre in a good summer.
The botanical name is worth a moment. Dracunculus means "little dragon", a name that follows the plant through the medieval herbals and is usually explained by its coiled, serpentine root system. The common name travelled a different road: the Arabic tarkhun became the medieval Latin tarchon, then the Old French targon and estragon, and finally the English tarragon. The same root survives almost unchanged in the name of the drink itself — tarhun.
Why tarragon tastes the way it does
The flavour lives in the volatile oil held in the leaf. The dominant compound is estragole, also called methyl chavicol, and it sits in the same aromatic family that gives anise, fennel and chervil their character. That is the liquorice register you notice first.
Around it sit lighter volatiles — ocimene and limonene among them — which supply the green, faintly citrus lift, and beneath everything there is a trace of the bitter sesquiterpenes that run through the whole Artemisia lineage. That last part is what stops tarragon from tasting like a sweet. It gives the herb a dry edge on the finish.
There is also a small trick of perception. Anise-type compounds create a cooling impression on the palate without any of the menthol that mint uses. Tarragon tastes cold. Serve it cold as well and the effect compounds, which is one reason tarragon drinks are so firmly a hot-weather thing.
French tarragon and the seed-grown type
Anyone who has grown the herb knows there are two very different plants sold under one name, and the difference matters more here than for almost any other herb.
French tarragon, Artemisia dracunculus var. sativa, is the culinary cultivar. It is effectively sterile, sets little or no viable seed, and is propagated by root division or cuttings — which is why it arrives as a plant, never as a seed packet. Its aroma is the concentrated one: sweet, clean, unmistakably anise.
The seed-grown type, usually listed as Artemisia dracunculoides, is taller, tougher, far hardier through a wet winter, and considerably coarser in flavour. The anise note is faint and the bitterness is more forward. It is a perfectly good garden plant and a disappointing culinary one. The practical rule for a gardener is simple: if it came from seed, it is the second type. French tarragon wants full sun and sharply drained soil, resents sitting wet, and is best lifted and divided every third year, when the clump begins to lose vigour.
How tarragon became a green soft drink
Herb-flavoured soft drinks are an old and thoroughly European habit. Elderflower cordial in Britain and Scandinavia, woodruff syrup in Germany, mint syrups across the Mediterranean, gentian and génépi in the Alpine valleys — in each case a wild or garden aromatic is steeped, sweetened and drunk cold. Tarragon belongs on that list rather than apart from it.
Its own version travelled from the Caucasus, where tarragon lemonade is the summer drink: the herb steeped or reduced to a syrup, sweetened, carbonated and served very cold, in the shade of an afternoon that is too hot for anything else. From there it spread across a wide stretch of southern and eastern Europe, and the name — tarhun — went with it.
One detail is usually misunderstood. The emphatic green colour of the classic bottled version has never come from the herb. Tarragon leaf gives a pale straw-green infusion at best; the vivid colour was added, and in most commercial versions still is. We add no colourings, so what you see in the glass is simply what the ferment produces.
Why an aromatic herb suits fermentation
Fermentation is, before anything else, a flavour process. Live cultures consume sugars and produce acids and carbon dioxide, and the drink that results is drier, sharper and gently sparkling rather than syrupy.
That shift suits tarragon particularly well. A heavily sweetened syrup drink tends to bury an aromatic herb under sugar; acidity does the opposite and lifts it, the same way a squeeze of lemon makes chopped herbs read louder on a plate. The carbonation helps too, since dissolved gas carries volatile aroma up out of the glass and into the nose. You smell the tarragon as much as you taste it.
Heat is the other consideration. Volatile aromatics are exactly the compounds that boiling drives off, which is why long-cooked tarragon tastes of so much less than fresh. Our fermentation is held below 45 °C throughout, so the aromatic character stays in the liquid.
How Fermentum Drink Tarhun is made
Fermentum Drink Tarhun is our classic tarragon bottle: one litre, EUR 15, and the bestseller of the range.
It is built on ionised highly alkaline water at pH 9.2, with seasonal fruits, herbs, honey — which is consumed during fermentation and is not present in the finished drink — stevia and artichoke syrup. The cultures are plant-based and of the Bacillus genus, including Bacillus subtilis. Fermentation happens under high pressure and below 45 °C, in small batches made by hand rather than by the tank.
There are no preservatives, colourings, flavourings or GMO ingredients, and nothing is pasteurised, so the tarragon aroma is not cooked out of the bottle on its way to you. Every batch is tested before it leaves us, and the small amount of alcohol fermentation produces leaves the drink classed as non-alcoholic. The vessel, the pressure and the temperature ceiling are set out step by step in how our fermented drinks are made.
How to serve a tarragon drink
Cold, but not straight from the fridge. Give it five minutes in the glass and the tarragon comes forward — at 5 °C you taste the fizz and the acidity and very little else. A tulip or a small wine glass gathers the aroma better than a tumbler, and skip the ice, which only dilutes what you came for. Turn the bottle gently rather than shaking it — it is a living drink and a little sediment is normal. The rest of the handling is in how to store and serve a living ferment.
The taste is fresh, lightly sweet and gently sparkling, with the anise note clear but not heavy. At the table it does the job a dry white usually does: eggs in any form, roast chicken, buttered new potatoes, goat's cheese, cucumber, cured or oily fish. Tarragon and butter is a classical French pairing for a reason, and the drink follows the same logic.
A litre bottle pours about seven small glasses — enough for a small table, or for several days. It sits alongside the rest of the range of living drinks, all made the same way and shipped chilled across the EU — delivery is EUR 4.90, or free over EUR 49.