Herbal Tea Recipes: How to Make Herbal Tea Blends for Natural Remedies

Homemade Herbal Tea Blends: How To

Get the skinny on basic tea making, explore various herbs to use as a base for your homemade teas. Plus, learn how to customize your own unique tea recipes to help aid in digestion, ease the symptoms of cold and flu and more. Keep reading to discover more about herbal tea making now. Plus grab a quick and easy medicinal herbal tea recipe for cold and flu relief. You’ll also discover several other recipes that you create using either herbs from your garden or organic herbs you purchase online.

I have longed love purchasing handmade products from other artisans like myself. Plant Makeup (formally Good 4 You Herbals on Etsy) is one such company that is always a joy to buy from. Not only does Jes use herbs and plants she’s wild harvested from her home state of Massachusetts, but she’s also lent her tea making inspiration through her own hand drawn labels and use of organic ingredients. She even bikes her orders to her local post office!

I reached out to Jes about her experience with making homemade teas. She was kind enough to provide additional information on how she creates her own DIY tea blends. I hope you enjoy her tutorial on how to make medicinal herbal tea recipes. These blends make great home remedies!

Basic Tea Making: Secrets to Crafting Medicinal Herbal Tea Recipes

Information courtesy of Jes of Plant Makeup

It’s easy to make medicinal herbal tea recipes. You can don’t even have to have an herbal apothecary. You can simply craft these homemade recipes from anything you can find in your kitchen spice cabinet. You can either buy dried herbs to make herbal tea blends. Or you can dry the herbs you grow in your tea garden.

Here are some of the basic herbs you can use to make tea at home. You’ll also discover the benefits of these ingredients and how they can help you during the winter or when you or a friend are in need. There are so many great herbal tea recipes and benefits to discover.

How to Make Medical Herbal Tea

There are four parts to formulating and blending a basic medical tea using herbs. Following is a break down of these parts to help you gain a basic understanding of how medicinal tea blends are created.

Part One: Basic Herbal Tea Base Recipe

These herbs are an example of the core components used to make an herbal tea:

• Peppermint– great for cooling the body, for irritated lungs or to ease colds, awesome stomach calmer.
• Ginger– for recipes that require more heat in the body, “to remove the cold”
• Yerba Mate– caffeinated, “the green tea of South America”, great for the mind, circulation, contains medicinal properties.

In addition to, or in lieu of these ingredients, you may also use green tea leaves, black tea leaves, white tea, roobios, spearmint, chamomile, or jasmine flowers. Basically any herb or tea leaf that is flavorful can be used to make the base. Your tea base should consist of 1 to 2 parts.

Part Two: Add Herbs to Ease Symptoms

Once you’ve created the base for your tea, it’s time to add additional herbs. These herbs are often chosen to add a unique flavor to the drink. However, you if you want to make medicinal teas for common ailments, you should choose ingredients for the health benefits they provide. Following are several examples of herbs used to make homemade teas along with the medicinal benefits they provide.

• Orange Peels or Lemon Peels– heating, rich in vitamin C.
• Hibiscus Flowers– heating, rich in vitamin C, turns the tea purple, helps “dry” the lungs of too much mucus.
• Marshmallow root– cooling, “wet”, adds a coat of mucilage if you have a dry cold, cough, throat.
• Gingko Leaves– heating, “the great circulator”, helps to move blood flow in the body.
• Eucalyptus– heating, soothing vapors!

You will want to add one part of this ingredient to your medicinal tea blend. Alternately, you can also combo more than one herb to equal one part of the tea recipe.

Part Three: Add Roots

While roots aren’t necessary to perfect your tea blend, they make a great addition! Roots are used in blends at 1/2 to 1 part. They are great for boosting your body’s strength and immunity, may help you cleanse toxins, and can help your body naturally adjust to stress, as in the case of adaptogens. Following are common roots used to create herbal tea recipes:

• Eleuthero Root– (Siberian ginseng) great strength builder, helps adjust you to winter conditions and stress, was used in Japan after atomic bombings to help people recover.
• Echinacea Root– great to help boost immunity right before you think you’re getting a cold.
• Dandelion Root– a great overall cleanse for the kidneys and liver. I think for the entire body!

Part Four: Add Sweetness

Sweeting you herbal teas is entirely optional. However, if you prefer a sweetener, then you may use a pinch of the following herbs or ingredients to your blends:

• Stevia Leaf– natural sweetener, 400 times sweeter than sugar, use only a half centimeter of leaf per cup, experiment and have fun, stevia is known to balance blood sugar levels and help diabetes.
• Licorice Root– yummy sweetener, adds mucilage if you have dry conditions. Don’t use too much of this one either.

Alternately, you can omit both of these ingredients. Simply sweeten your medicinal tea blends with raw honey or sugar, as desired, after brewing and steeping.

Where to Source Medicinal Herbs to Make Tea

There are numerous places to source the herbs needed to create medical tea blends.

Online

Many places sell organic herbs that can be use make quality, homemade herbal teas. My favorite and most trusted source for tea-grade herbs is Mountain Rose Herbs. They sell both bulk herbs and spices, including popular mushrooms, as well as organic tea leaves.

Tea or Herb Garden

Your summer garden is another great source for the ingredients use to make herbal tea blends. The following herbs are commonly used to help ease the symptoms from colds and sore throats. These herbs can easily grow in an herbal tea garden. They offer a number of amazing natural properties containing antibacterials, antimicrobials, and so on. They include the following:

• Thyme
• Lemon balm
• Mints
• Hyssop
• Feverfew (a great cold fighter, use very little amounts)
• Dandelion leaves (great cleanser, lots of vitamins and minerals)
• Sage
• Catnip

Kitchen Spices

Many of the spices commonly found in your kitchen can also be sourced to make medicinal tea blends. These ingredients can be used can greatly reduce symptoms of a cold, move menstruation, as well as to help with digestion.

If you are making an herbal tea recipe for menstrual cramps, try an herbal blend of rosemary leaves, lemon balm, and cayenne.

Additionally, because cayenne pepper is naturally hot, it also makes a great expectorant if you have a stuffy nose. It also has amazing antibacterial properties. This allows it to help purify and detox the body when you have a cold or sore throat. As such, it works in a similar way to fire cider vinegar to help combat cold and flu symptoms due to these natural properties.

Alternately, you can also add a touch of the following kitchen spices to help move a cold out of the body:

• Cinnamon
• Cloves,
• Black pepper
• Cardamom
• Fennel

You’ll find that these kitchen spices are perfect for your herbal tea recipes when you need natural cold and flu relief.

How to Brew Herbal Tea Recipes

Once you’ve made your first DIY tea blend, it’s time to test the results! Here’s how to brew medicinal teas for their natural health benefits:

1. To brew your herbal tea recipes, boil fresh water.

2. Once the water reaches boiling, remove water from heat.

3. Then pour the boiling water into cup of medicinal herbs you prepared. (I use a heaping teaspoon per serving.)

4. Steep the tea with cup covered for about 10 minutes. (Except for teas in the green tea family, steep for about 4 minutes.) Covering the cup helps to prevent the oils and other medicinal components found in the tea blend from evaporating.

5. Add additional sweetener to the tea, if desired. Then sip and enjoy.

Quick Herbal Tea Recipe for Natural Cold Relief:

If you’re looking for herbal tea recipes for cold relief, but don’t have an herbal apothecary, then try this simple cold and flu tea remedy. This tea is formulated using ginger and cayenne for a quick and easy way to relieve cold symptoms.

Sore Throats & Cold Relief Herbal Tea Recipe

Ingredients:

You will need the following ingredients to make this herbal cold relief tea recipe:

• Fresh ginger root, chopped
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 1/2 lemon
• Pinch of powdered cayenne pepper

How to Make Cold Relief Tea:

To make this cold relief tea to relieve the symptoms of congestion and sore throat, follow these steps:

1. Chop fresh ginger root, then simmer in a pot of water for 15 minutes. Remove from heat.
2. Now add a teaspoon of honey, half a lemon, and a pinch of cayenne per serving.
3. Alternately, you can also just use regular black or green tea instead of ginger.