tea/infusions/tisanes - How hard is it to mix your own spice teas?

Karmakaze — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 07:41:45 -0800

tea/infusions/tisanes - How hard is it to mix your own spice teas? Note, in common American English usage, tea refers to pretty much any leafy/herby mixture steeped in water. Some people use tea to mean only stuff made with leaves from the tea bush (Camellia sinensis) and everything else is a 'tisane' (or 'infusion' or 'herbal tea'). I tend to refer to everything as tea, and qualify black/green/white tea (for 'real' tea) and herbal tea (for everything else) as context requires.

A few years back I discovered that every time I failed to drink coffee for a couple of days, I had a nasty migraine-like hangover. It happened often enough that I let the withdrawal run its course, and chose to thereafter limit my caffeine intake. I was primarily drinking coffee (provided free) at work to overcome the excess air conditioning, so all I really needed was an alternate hot beverage. I don't like the taste of cheap-o free work coffee enough to drink it decaffeinated, and decaffeinated black tea tends to taste like stewed cardboard.

I quickly learned that you can only drink so much mint or chamomile tea (in fact, I don't even like chamomile that much. I only keep it around to pass to co-workers with upset stomachs.) I find I don't much like rooibos/redbush, but most other herbal teas are either bland or sour (sour's ok, but not on an empty stomach). I found a brand (Yogi Tea) with some flavors of the non-caffeinated category that I like, but my favorites tend to require a trip to a fancy supermarket. Recently, even the fancy supermarket didn't even have the varieties I was looking for. Sadly, I live in deep suburbia, so it's hard to find anything like a proper tea shop.

It occurred to me that the India Spice tea is basically the spices that go into spice chai, except without the black tea included. I already know how to make a ginger tea by pouring hot water over a little grated ginger root. We have spices all over the house (whole nutmeg, all that sort of thing). So, in theory, it shouldn't be too hard for me to either mix up a spice tea from scratch, or to doctor up something I already have that just needs a kick.

What spices are soluble, and how do you make them more soluble for these purposes? Are there tricks to figuring out the right proportions of spice-to-other-spices or spice-to-water? Should I just bite the bullet and try to find an affordable mail-order house?

What makes for a good tisane?

terceiro — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 17:04:11 -0800

TeaFilter: Recently my wife tried an herbal tea and much to her and my surprise, she liked it. It was just a cheap bag, and so now I'm interested in finding some better stuff. What are some good tisanes to try? Where should I get it? What's the necessary equipment for a truly great brew? I should mention that I'm primarily interested in tisanes (herb tea), not traditional leaf teas. Thanks for understanding. Everything we'd had before was pretty fruity (and forgettable): this was much more herbal. I'm looking for both the grocery-store easy-and-inexpensive as well as the exotic and expensive (if there is such a thing as expensive herb tea).

Online resources are prefered, since we live kinda out of the way of just about everything.

Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with tisane

tea/infusions/tisanes - How hard is it to mix your own spice teas?

What makes for a good tisane?