InTea

How to make homemade herbal tea

Herbal tea is practically any tea you make from fresh or dried herbs. It doesn’t matter if you buy them already dried and mixed, or you mix them yourself or you even freshly pick them out in the nature.
Making your herbal tea at home gives you the freedom to combine as many ingredients as you want. Depending on the reason for making your tea, you might want it to help you with some digestive problem or any other issue. Maybe you just want to make it just because you love tea and you want to experience various tastes.

If you already have herbs at home, you can use them. Otherwise you might want to read a bit about their benefits and see which ones you would like to have in your home.

If you want to learn how to dry your own herbs at home, you can read here more about it:
DIY: How to dry herbs for tea in 5 easy steps

Herbal Tea Benefits

The benefits of herbal teas are endless, depending on which plants you choose to use. You can find some benefits for various teas in my posts:
– green tea
– chamomile
– nettle
– mint
– pu-erh
– Chinese red tea
– how to fight stress with tea
– detox teas

How to make homemade herbal tea

The actual process of making tea has some quite simple steps:
1. Prepare the tea herbs and mix them
2. Boil water
3. Add water over the herbs
4. Wait 3-5 minutes and Enjoy!

What can you put in your homemade tea blend?
Well…a lot of things!

I will give you some ideas of ingredients you can add to enhance the benefits and flavor of your tea.

Herbal tea ingredients

Dried Herbs

Some basic dried herbs I always have at home are:
– chamomile
– mint
– marigold
– green tea
– rose hips
– nettle
– linden

Spices

– cinnamon sticks
– parsley
– rosemary
– thyme
– cumin seeds
– cloves
– star anise
– nutmeg
– dried fruits

Fresh ingredients

– ginger root
– turmeric root
– fruits, berries
– honey
– orange peel

After you have some ingredients, you can start combining them. You can use your imagination and think about flavours and combinations of tastes and benefits.

For fruit-based teas, usually the base consists of hibiscus flowers, which gives it a red colour and a bit sour taste.
Any of the above ingredients can be the only ingredient of a tea if you just want to enjoy it on its own.

Flavoured green tea

You can buy a bigger bag of green tea leaves and make it the base of your teas. Green tea is a great antioxidant and you can play with it by adding various flavours to it.
The trick is to not combine too many at once, because you will not feel them anymore or you might end up with a strange taste.

You can also pay attention to the strong flavours. Usually it is enough to add only one strong flavour and combine it with other ingredients with a less strong taste. The strong one will set the main taste of the flavour of your tea and after that you can imagine what else would go nicely with it.

If the base of your tea is green tea, be careful to not steep it for too long.
Green tea can be steeped for 1-3 minutes. I personally know when it is ready by checking the color of the tea. If you over steep it, it will have a bitter taste and you will not really enjoy the combination of flavours anymore.

Rooibos tea

Rooibos is another great base for tea if you don’t want it to have caffeine. The steeping time is similar to fruit teas so the entire mix can be steeped for 3-5 minutes.
You don’t need to set a base for all your herbal teas. Just combining some of the ingredients is enough to obtain a flavorful tea rich in benefits.

Herbal teas Recipe ideas:

Healing Tea

I have a nice recipe which I call healing tea. All its ingredients help with skin inflammations, small wounds, water retention.It can even slow down the ageing process.
You can find the full list of ingredients, description and benefits here.

Tea blend to relieve pain, cramps, cough

Another recipe I use, which is great for relieving pains, cramps and it soothes coughs is made of: shepherd’s-purse, yarrow, wild marjoram and breckland thyme. You can check here all it benefits and how to make it.