How to make Homemade Tea

Imagine sipping a warm cup of home-brewed tea and enjoying the aromatic flavors and scents of dried and fresh herbs.

Winter is almost over, can I get a hallelujah?! I don’t know about you, but I have been craving sunshine and warm temperatures, all of which come around rather seldom during this time of the year. But now that we are at the end of February it’s time to get ready for March and that means….SPRING IS COMING! Woooohoooooo!! But wait! Isn’t this post about tea, you may be wondering. Yes, it is. Don’t worry you have come to the right place. But let’s face it, spring or not, there is always a reason to drink tea. ALWAYS.

So you might not be such an extreme tea drinker as I am, but making your own tea flavours is still something exciting. Yes, I just called making tea exciting. It’s like instead of an inner child, I have an inner 80-year-old lady, who loves tea. But c’mon how can you not love experimenting with different herbs, flowers and spices? When making your own tea, the options are truly endless!

Today I am giving you several different options of homemade tea you can make in your own kitchen. I am too embarrassed to call these recipes because let’s face it, this isn’t even cooking, heck you don’t even need a kitchen to make this. It’s almost as simple as dropping a tea bag into a mug, with just 1 tiny extra step. That step is buying tea filters. I bought my tea filters at David’sTea during a trip to Canada, but feel free to use any brand you like.

There are two different ways to make homemade tea. Option one is using fresh ingredients. This is the easier method, however, you cannot store it and need to use your homemade tea blend immediately. The second option is using dried ingredients by simply drying the herbs and fruit peels in your oven. This way you can make bigger batches and store them for another time.

If you want to use dry ingredients like I did here, the method is pretty straight forward. Preheat your oven to 80°C and select your fruits and herbs. (Make sure to only use organic fruit for this.) Wash and peel your citrus fruits and ginger, wash your herbs and spread both on a baking sheet fitted with a parchment paper. (Use the leftover fruit flesh for e.g. a fruit salad or infused water.) The herbs take about 30 minutes to dry and the fruit peels about 1 hour. After that chop up the pieces and store or use immediately.

Here are some tasty tea ingredients:

ginger
lemon peel
orange peel
mint
chamomile
sage
lavender
elderflower
cinnamon
cloves

You can either use the ingredients individually or make your own blends such as lemon-ginger, chamomile-lavender or lemon-orange-cinnamon….

The amount you need per tea bag depends on the flavor you are creating and the same goes for the brewing time. I found that orange and lemon take about 8 minutes to properly infuse while chamomile was already intense after 4 minutes. It really depends on your ingredients and what intensity you are going for.