Herbal tea is a wonderful drink. Not every having been much of a tea drinker and always interested in herbs and lotions and potions, about 6 years ago I started to regularly drink home made herbal tea.
Now, I approach making herbal tea like making a stock - there are three main considerations:
1. ingredients that will provide the maximum and most pleasant flavour
2. a little bit of intuition about what combination of things will make excellent tea
3. access to ingredients.
I guess I started when I lived in Sydney, and had access easily to a great range of ingredients - both most excellent blends of herbs to be drunk on thier own or mixed with others, and to fresh, dried, elemental herbs - things like red clover, marigold leaves, a magnificent range of mints etc etc.
These days, no longer in Sydney and only average blends available locally, I souce some ingredients via the net, buy some whenever in Sydney, grow a lot myself and have extended my range by including all sorts of Asian things from the local Asian shops, and incorporate some spices.
Here is my general method:
Start with ginger. Depending on the pot, put in 2 - 10 slices of FRESH ginger. Add other ingredients depending on your mood, add boiling water and maybe some high quality honey, wait 2 or 3 minutes and pour. You can fill the pot again and again with boiling water without need to refresh the ingredients.
My best simple basic tea is ginger alone or ginger with fresh lemon grass (or freshly dried lemongrass if you must). Add kaffir lime leaves (1 or 2) if you have them. Delicious.
Build up from there. Add any dried herb - rosemary is good, small amounts of thyme, even a sprig of parsley is surprising excellent. Lots of mint. It was a suprise to me initially that herbs we think of as "savoury" ie would not be good in teas, really work well - parsley, rosemary, basil, for example. Just keep their proportion smaller than other ingredients. (But on reflection, basil is GREAT in fruit salads, so why would it not be great in tea?)
Vary by adding dried red dates from the Chinese Market, or those little dried rose buds.
If you have access to good range of freshly dried herbs, roots and flowers, grab a range of them and keep them on hand to add a teaspoon here, a teaspoon there. Above all, avoid those dried things that look like they were dried before the Ark sailed!
Spices that go well are cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, a couple of black pepper corns (yes, really) nutmeg, star anise and cinnamon etc.
You can add genchami (sp?) the Japanese popped rice tea, or roobos the South African root. You can even add a pinch of black or green tea.
Dried licquorish is also great.
So go wild. Develop your sense of what makes a good tea for you. Experiment. My place is so well known for its teas, and my visitors expect nothing else. No coffee (although i drink it once or twice per day) or alcohol. They just want TEA.
Today my tea was simple - fresh ginger, kaffir lime, cardamom leaf, parsley leaf, and mint - all from my balcony pot garden except for the ginger which was from an organic shop. Added my favourite honey which I keep only for tea making. I am on my second pot already!
Enjoy!
