I found the Chinese grocery yesterday I had wanted to find for some time but always ran out of time or energy before doing so.

Looked at their spices and bought some. Noticed a plastic bag marked “cinnamon stick” and looked at the ends of the sticks. Oh dear, not cinnamon!

Introducing cassia.

If you need a stick or two of cinnamon for your curry or sweet dish or preserving peaches etc etc then adding cassia sticks will result in massive disappointment—they add very little taste/aroma.

You can look up where cinnamon and cassia come from—doesn’t matter for the purpose of this post.

Fortunately, it is easy to distinguish between cinnamon and cassia:

Look at the end of the sticks.

1. If it looks like one thick leaf forming something like a capital ‘C’ then you have cassia. Throw it away and go buy cinnamon!

2. If the stick if made up of lots of thin layers making a solid stick then, congratulations you have proper cinnamon.


Is cassia totally useless? For cooking, yes. For making a nice spiced lager, no.

Adding a stick of cinnamon to the boiling wort will give a beer that is beyond medicinally bitter, undrinkably bitter! Adding two sticks of cassia in place of one stick of cinnamon will give a nice cinnamony flavor/aroma to the lager. This doesn’t show up at once, takes a few months to show.

Don’t buy the fake cinnamon! 

Preground spices have little flavor or aroma tho.

Not as good as fresh.