The What, Why and When of Healthy Tea Recipes

What is the Healthy Tea Recipes blog?

This is simply a place for me to share my own healthy and delicious cold tea recipes. Sometimes I drink them chilled, sometimes as iced tea. There was a lack of videos on Youtube so that is where I began. A month or two later and here I am adding a blog too.

Iced tea is usually thought of as Lipton lemon and black tea bags with large amounts of sugar. The iced tea recipes I make are nothing like this. I am not a fan of Lipton and I don't allow sugar in my apartment. We have local honey which we use occasionally as a substitute.

The teas on this blog are known as herbal tea or tisane tea, "an infusion (as of dried herbs) used as a beverage or for medicinal effects", source. This means they do not usually contain real teas from the tea plant. Therefore most recipes do not have any caffeine in them. No recipes have any sweetener added either. The honey I mentioned above is only for cooking and occasionally using with my English breakfast/builders tea with milk, which is drunk hot.

Why does it exist?

My love for tea, both hot and cold is something I wish to share with the world. Many people cover hot teas like Puerh, Oolong, Black Tea, White Tea and Green Tea. Check out the Mei Leaf Youtube channel which is a great place to start for real loose leaf teas. They are intimidatingly good at presenting, explaining and tasting teas, so I am not even going to try and compete by talking about real teas. But I do love my hot teas of all types. Below is most of my current collection. I am awaiting a delivery of white and green teas any day now:

Most of my current hot tea collection. All loose leaf except for good old PG Tips which I grew up drinking in the UK.

However, there aren't many people also making tisane recipes on Youtube. There are people who do it for specific things like slimming and many regurgitate other's content. Therefore, I felt there was room for me.

I live in Southeast Asia most of the time, where it is very hot, and I work at home most of the time; I used to drink about 3-4 liters of water every day. I cycle when out and come back ready to drink a lot of water. That was on top of drinking a hot tea all day too and one coffee in the morning.

My grandmother's sister is in her mid-80s and could easily pass for 65. She looks great. The one thing she attributed this to before anything else was drinking lemon water. Especially before anything else when waking up. So I gave it a try and loved it, but it soon got a bit boring. It wasn't something I wanted to replace water every day.

One day we were served Chrysanthemum iced tea at a local restaurant. Then a friend told us about his Jiaogulan Tea business. I tried it hot and wasn't overly keen, having been spoiled by great hot teas like the pictured above. So I bought some Chrysanthemum to try an iced tea, which didn't quite fix it, then I added lemon, then black tea...

Then I got hooked on blending different herbs, spices, fruit and flowers together. Below is a photo of my current collection of ingredients for making healthy iced teas. What I love about making these recipes is that you get to invent a new one each day. Then when I come across a real winner I make a video about it, which also helps me remember the ingredients so I can return to them in future.

I have 2 new plants to try: Mulberry and Pandan leaves. Shortly after taking this photo I couldn't resist buying lemongrasss too.

As you can see from the above I am not totally against tea bags. Some ingredients actually need to be in tea bags, such as cinnamon. If I haven't had any exercise I will have the sleepytime tea to help me sleep and I love the Black tea with vanilla as a travel tea when I don't have my equipment and ingredients. I drink those two hot so they are actually in the wrong photo.

Why now?

I don't see many people mixing ingredients like these as fanatically as I do. Being away from the West has got me into more of a "wholefoods" mindset, rather than looking for pre-packaged tea infusions.

The history behind tea in different regions is interesting. The teaware is nice to collect. Plus I love the colors which can be completely different and be inviting from one day to the next. Below is a small part of my teawares as I would drink it daily. The jug contains hot Puerh tea, 12 years aged from China.

I shamelessly like showing off my teaware as well as my healthy tea recipes. The glass on the left is today's cold tea.

The glass on the left is iced tea, which is ultra refreshing after a bicycle ride in the Thai heat at 1pm. This is a similar recipe to my first Youtube video with Roselle flowers (Hibiscus, which is red), Jiaogulan, Chrysanthemum, Bael Fruit, a few Butterfly Pea flowers (blue, to make it purple) and a little black tea. Roselle and Jiaogulan are my favorite ingredients as they have such a noticeable effect. The Jiaogulan for health- it really lifts my mood as well as many other things. The Roselle gives off a red color and is naturally sweet, like a cherry or cranberry juice.

In the photo above I have also added 2 extra cups behind; it is nice to collect teawares with their Oriental artwork. I purchased the white porcelain cup with blue art just a week ago, after wanting one for ages.

The French Press (also known as a cafetière) is where I make all my cold tea recipes. It is better than an infuser like in the teapot because there is much more space for all the ingredients to fully open up and infuse. Plus I recently learned that coffer made with a French press might increase cholesterol, so I have stopped doing that. Apparently, it is healthier to either have filter coffee like they usually do in The States, or even instant coffee, although I assume the latter will remove some health benefits.

Anyway, enough about coffee, this is a tea blog. So let's get posting those videos with recipes and how to make them. 😉🍸🌷🌿