Tea Reviews | It's All About The Leaf

Posts Tagged ‘wood betony tea’

This has been a week fraught with multiple incidents of hamster-heart, battery-acid-in-the-veins panic. In deep need of a tea to soothe my frazzled nerves, I pawed through my stash of samples and decided Red Leaf’s Eight Herb tea might do the trick.

This herbal tea is ground fine and looks like oregano or an Italian seasoning blend. Had a nice clean smell in the packet, but I couldn’t place any of the components in my introductory sniff. But the flavors really started to pop after a good strong steep (a generous teaspoon to an 8 oz. cup, water at a good sound boil, five minutes in the cup).

I tried to guess the ingredients before I peeked at the Red Leaf website to confirm. My stressed-out palate caught the lemony taste (lemon balm) and something minty (spearmint), but I missed the rest: rosemary, linden, eucalyptus, wood betony, eleuthero, and blackberry leaf, contributing to a nice sweetness that you don’t find in many herbal combos.

Curious about the mystery ingredients, I checked out eleuthero–which is evidently an “adaptogen,” something that helps the body adapt to stress. Wood betony is a folk medicine that is purported to lower blood pressure and reduce anxiety.  Linden is believed to have a sedative effect. (Ahhhhh! Deep cleansing breath.)  I don’t know if a single cup will erase a week’s worth of scream-inducing stress, but I’m certainly enjoying the experiment.

You can purchase Red Leaf Tea Eight Herb Tea directly from their website.