Green Matcha Tea

Perhaps you long to get in better contact with Mother Nature and use more natural medicines.  Or, perhaps you have an abundance of herbs in your garden and wonder what to do with them all.  Or, perhaps you want to explore different tastes offered by herbal teas in a creative and easy way.  By making herbal teas, you can do all of this.

So Many Choices

Get your tea making equipment set up before you bring in the herbs.  It needn’t be fancy or expensive.  You can boil it in a regular saucepan and drain the mixture with a sieve before serving (unless you like picking leaves out of your teeth).  There are also tea balls and tea strainers made for the purpose of putting your material in and out of a tea pot or individual cup.

One of the best ways of making herbal tea for one or two cups is with a cafetire, usually sold to make coffee. It’s sometimes sold under the more descriptive name of “coffee plunger”.  You put the herbs, chopped fruit, spices or whatever into the glass beaker; let it steep in boiling hot water for ten minutes and then put the plunger apparatus on top of the beaker and push down.  This traps all of the solid matter, leaving your tea chunky-free and ready to sip.  Use one cupped handful of fresh, roughly chopped herbs or a half a teaspoon of dried herbs for each cup of tea you are making. Mixing it with some green matcha tea is a great idea too.

Making herbal teas is like any other recipe.  You can follow the recipe to the letter, or use it a guideline to improvise to suit your own tastes.  Some herbs like mint or lemon balm can use some sweetener, while some herbs like rosemary work better with lemon juice added instead of sugar.  Some herbs are quite bitter and, well, taste like dirt (such as St. John’s Wort) so they heed quite a bit of sweetener.

Soon you can mix herbs, spices and fruits to see what flavor combinations you can come up with.  As your taste buds get used to herbal teas, you might find that you need to cut back on the sweetener.  This writer can’t tolerate any sweetener in her nettle tea, for example, although I did when I started to drink it.  Also note your body’s reactions to the herbal teas for future reference.  Ginger tea tends to heat up the body very quickly – perfect after having to trudge through winter rains.