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For the past couple of weeks – seemingly forever – I’ve been sick with some sort of annoying viral thing that is probably a common cold. Aside from the general inconvenience of it all, one of the most aggravating aspects of it is the impact it has had on my tea drinking. I still have the desire to drink good tea, but the congestion in my head and chest makes it so that I can’t taste things accurately. Foods and beverages that are normally delicious don’t taste right, and don’t taste as good as they ought to. I have continued to drink tea, but I tend to drink tea and other non-tea infusions based on what kind of physiological change I want to effect, not based on what I want to taste.

Last week, in lieu of missing work and resting, I was taking NyQuil at night and DayQuil during the day in order to remain relatively functional. This is an effective strategy, but it made me feel like I was operating from inside a large blanket of lukewarm fog. And it was not a soft, comforting fog; it was more like an annoying, thick, impenetrable barrier between my brain and the world. Some people like that feeling. I don’t.

So after three days of the nullifying medicine cycle, I decided to hold off on the bright orange syrrupy narcotic for as long as I could during the day. Before I left for work that day I thought about whether I had any helpful, counteractive infusion-ready substances around the house. I had some gingko leaf, which is good for clearing brain fog, and cloves, which have analgesic properties and can help with respiration. (There weren’t as many cloves as I would have liked because most of them had been placed into little metal tins to be batted around the living room floor by one of the cats, but there were enough to be worth using.) Unfortunately, I did not have any mint at the time, which would have been my chosen third ingredient. But I took what I had with me to work and steeped them in a glass teapot for about five minutes with boiling water.

I can not, of course accurately describe that the resultant brew tasted good. With my palate as out of alignment as it was, it’s hard to say, but it did taste refreshing. More importantly, it helped make me feel better. If I remember correctly, I infused that same pot about three times, until it seemed too weak to be worth the effort to drink.

Hot liquids of just about any type are somewhat soothing during this sickness, but I must say that I’m more than ready to drink good tea and fully appreciate it again very soon!

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“The orange is native to China, and its aroma is said to delight the senses while calming the heart. Which is just what this fairly-traded organic green tea, with its sweetly scented blossoms, will do. It contains organic lemongrass, osthmanthus flowers, lemon myrtle, and natural essential oils of rose, orange lime and tangerine. Refreshing and soothing, for any occasion.”

As you can probably tell, looking at the picture of the pre-steeped blend above, it’s pretty heavy on the lemon grass. Just perusing the list of ingredients leads to the logical assumption that it would be heavy on the citrus flavors and have quite a tang to it, and it does, but in a gentler way than one might expect.

I really like the way this tea smells before it is brewed. Since I was curious about what sort of associations other people might come up with, I handed some of it over to a friend to see what she would say upon smelling it. Her assessment was that it smelled like SweeTarts. I can see that similarity, although I find it kind of funny since it’s made up of entirely of bits of dried plants, which seem quite different from the great little colorful blocks of industrialized dextrose that fill a SweeTart wrapper. The actual brew doesn’t really taste like SweeTarts. It’s a sweet, lemony, orangy, acidic, but not at all bitter drink, and one that’s quite nice.

Oranges remind me of Sergei Prokofiev, and writing about them has resulted in the March running through my head, so here’s a clip from the opera Amour des trois Oranges (“For the Love of Three Oranges”), performed by the Opera Bastille in 2005. The story for the opera was adapted from a rather horrifying Italian folktale in the Commedia dell’Arte tradition.

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Ice it. Almost everyone is familiar with the deliciousness of iced tea, as it’s a quintessential summer beverage. You don’t have to use the classic black tea, however, as green and white teas can make equally as tasty iced tea. Experiment with tea types to find the perfect blend for your tastes.

Add fruit. Summer is a time when many fruits are at their peak so why not take advantage and use them to flavor your tea? Raspberries, blueberries and even oranges can add a lot to tea and make it feel super summer ready.

Sweeten it. For those with a sweet tooth, summer can be the perfect excuse to sweeten up your tea more than usual. Try out a great southern iced tea recipe for a much sweeter take on the usually bitter taste of tea.

Combine it with other beverages. Tea doesn’t have to go it alone when you’re searching for a great summer beverage. Flavor your tea with lemonade, pomegranate juice or a variety of other juices for a refreshing and healthy twist on regular tea.

Make a punch. Whether you choose to add alcohol or not is up to you, but tea can be a great addition to many summer-friendly punches. Mixed with fruit, juices and sparkling water, tea can bring a lot of life to the party.

Use it to flavor other foods. Like sorbet? Wouldn’t tea sorbet be even better? There are many summery recipes that use tea as a flavoring agent. From duck to cheesecake, there are tons of recipes out there that can let you have your tea and eat it too.

Some tea enthusiasts claim that tea can actually help prevent sunburn and be healthier for you than water. Whether these are true claims or not, there’s no reason to skip out on tea when the temperatures climb.

This post was contributed by Meredith Walker, who writes about the nursing degree. She welcomes your feedback at MeredithWalker1983 at gmail.com.

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On a day that many people are thinking about roses, so am I, but in the form of a very pleasant tisane. Infusions of young Chinese rose buds (Mei Gui Hua 玫瑰花) are a traditional tea used in Chinese medicine. Every Chinese apothecary I’ve been in carries it, and so do many Chinese tea shops, but the prices and freshness vary tremendously. I nearly always see it offered in two types, red and pink.

The dry buds are quite lovely and smell completely unlike that cloying scent of your grandmother’s perfume. It’s very easy to brew consistently: pour boiling water over it and let steep for a while, perhaps somewhere between 3-12 minutes. I don’t think it’s possible to over steep it. I was able to get 4 infusions out of it before the buds began to fall apart and lose their color.

It’s quite a pleasant beverage for times when you want to drink something without caffeine. It also has the added benefit of looking quite pretty in the pot. Naturally I recommend a glass brewing vessel for maximum effect.

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The interesting thing that I discovered was that after just one sip of this brew I found that my breathing was considerably clearer. My breathing is generally slightly congested and just a tiny bit wheezy, probably caused by some low-grade form of asthma, but not enough to take any medication for it or to give it any attention at all. But ocassionally I ingest something that clears it up, which can be a very pleasant surprise. The Organic Detox did an excellent job, and the effects lasted for at least a couple of hours.

Aside from its curative properties, the Organic Detox tastes quite good. The predominant flavors are the two varieties of mint leaves with an undercurrent flavor of licorice, combining into a nicely balanced blend. It seems like a good brew for cooler weather.

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Greek Mountain Shepherd’s Tea (tsai tou vounou) is the leaves and bud of the Sideritis syriaca L. plant. It is a pleasant, meadowy flavored brew, purported to have en enormous range as a medicinal tonic, including prevention of osteoporosis and treatment of respiratory ailments. More information about Greek Mountain Tea can be read here and here.

The osmanthus, lingchi, honey beverage pictured is a Chinese product. Not to be confused with true teas supplemented with osmanthus flowers, this contains only osmanthus flowers, lingchi mushrooms (ganoderma lucidum, also known as reishi mushrooms) and honey. Reishi mushroom has a long and noble history in Chinese medicine as a treatment for a large number of general and specific ailments. Be careful never to substitute “lingchi” with “ling-chi,” or the health benefits of reishi mushrooms will be replaced by the “Death by a Thousand Cuts.”

French verveine, comprised of the leaves of the lemon verbena plant (verbena officinalis), yields one of the few tisanes commonly found in Europe. It is lemony and refreshing, but I don’t find it terribly inspiring. It’s a good alternative to tea if one is seeking something without caffeine. More information and a source for purchasing it can be found here, on The Tao of Tea’s site.

Of my examples, Vietnamese artichoke tea (tra atiso) is probably the most unusual. The first time I ever had it was in a Vietnamese restaurant where it was prepared with fresh artichokes, but the dried form is fairly easy to find. If you can locate a Southeast Asian grocery you can find this tea. Since it is made from the flower, the same part of the artichoke plant that we eat in other forms, it tastes pretty similar to what you would imagine. Its myriad health benefits, primarily targeting the liver and blood, are listed here.

From the source cited above, further evidence that artichokes are the very best food on the entire planet, a position I have held for quite some time:

Cynarin is considered one of artichoke’s main biologically active chemicals. It occurs in the highest concentration in the leaves of the plant. In the 1970s, European scientists first documented cynarin’s ability to lower cholesterol in humans. Its choleretic (bile stimulating) action has been well documented and has led to the popular use of artichoke extract in Europe for treating mild dyspepsia and indigestion – particularly following a meal high in fat.

The photograph in my last article is of a pot of artichoke tea brewing.

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A recent conversation about the word “tisane” led me toward a considerable amount of reading about the word’s origins and meanings and the suitability of the word for contemporary use. My position in the original discussion was that “tisane” was a word that properly identified an infusion of anything other than the leaves of the tea plant, camellia sinensis. My defense and support of the word emerged from the goal of leaving the word “tea” out of any term for something without any tea plants in it. The person on the other side of this discussion held that it was a pretentious word that had only recently come into vogue in the United States among people who want to sound knowledgeable.

My initial investigations led to the conclusion that “tisane” was a French word that meant nothing more than “herbal tea.” As such, it was not any more accurate than “herbal tea” was in English. It does seem likely that “tisane” only came into common use through attempts by people selling and writing about tea to sound more formal or fancy, not because it had a more specific meaning or traditional use among tea experts. The earliest Greek forms of the word “tisane” refer to infusions of barley with herbs, which really gets us no closer to how it should be used now.

After reading more, including, this discussion on the French-English forum of wordreference.com, I have reached the conclusion that “tisane” by itself has very little actual meaning, but it can be of use. Functionally, it appears to translate from the French much more accurately into the English word “infusion” as it is often used with additional details, like tisane de tilleul, an infusion of linden flowers, or tisane de menthe, an infusion of mint leaves, but the French seem to use it interchangeably with the word “infusion.” (Note: “tisane” and infusion” are both cognates, each spelled and defined identically in both French and English.)

In contrast, the French word “thé” is used any time the tea plant provides one or more ingredients to an infusion, whether exclusively or in combination with non-tea ingredients. “Thé” is never used when the tea plant is absent, with the inexplicable exception of Rooibos, as it is called “thé rouge” in French in spite having no tea in it. Other infusions of herbs, flowers, fruits, etc. are identified with the structure of “infusion of x” or “tisane of y,” which is perfectly useful and clear.

I also looked into what terms the Chinese and Koreans used for their traditional non-tea infusions. The Chinese have a lot of flower infusions, which in translation are usually called “flower teas” or just called by exactly what they are: lotus flowers (Jin Lian Hua), osmanthus (Gui Hua), chrysanthemum (Ju Hua), rose bud (Mei Gui Hua), etc. Note: “Hua” in Mandarin means “flower.” Usually if something Chinese is called an “herbal tea” it has medicinal properties. Jiao Gu Lan, (Gynostemma Phentaphyllum) is a good example.

The Koreans have a number of traditional non-tea infusions, such as okusu-cha, which is roasted corn, bori-cha, which is roasted barley, and yuja-cha, which is a fermented citron tea, sold in jars like marmalade. Note that all of the English transliterations of the Korean end in “cha,” which would indicate that in Korea “cha” means a lot more than exclusively an infusion of tea plants.

The essence of what I was searching for was a way to clearly and accurately refer to infusions of flowers, fruits or herbs that do not contain tea. But I think that for the most part this goal was misguided. I don’t have much need for an all-encompassing label other than as the category for for “not-tea, not-coffee, not-chocolate.” “Herbal tea” is clearly a vague and misleading term since the ingredients are not always herbs, so I am unlikely to ever make use of it. If I want to write about an infusion of violet petals I can call it “infusion of violet.” Although I haven’t completely made peace with the word “tisane” it will probably suffice when nothing more specific suits the purpose. It does have the benefit of being commonly used in a consistent manner, so it is not prone to misinterpretation.

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In addition to their own specific form of the tea ceremony, the Koreans have a centuries-old tradition of drinking tisanes prepared with fruits, spices and leaves. One of these, which I discovered in a Korean grocery store, is sujeonggwa (수정과, 水正果), sometimes spelled “soojunggwa” and other ways. It is made from ginger, cinnamon, sugar, dried persimmon and pine nuts. The dried form that I purchased comes in small packets of powdered mixture which dissolve into boiling water, producing a lovely, sweet flavored and refreshing beverage. The chewy, sweet whole pine nuts float on the surface of the yellow-orange liquor. The English post-export ingredients sticker on the box does not list persimmon, but since this particular tea is a standard in Korean cuisine, and since persimmons are pictured prominently on the box, I am pretty certain of its inclusion. More information is available from the manufacturer (primarily in Korean).

Here is a one recipe for making it from scratch, and here is another.

The quote that follows, from an article on the importance of the seasons in Korean tea drinking, in the Japanese magazine Kateigaho, is an explanation of the socio-political factors that affected the history of tea traditions in Korea:

Why haven’t green and black teas steeped with leaves of Camellia sinensis taken hold in Korea as they have in neighboring China and Japan? Their absence stems from Confucianism’s infiltration in the 14th century. According to Korea’s oldest history book, Samguk Sagi (Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms), the custom of drinking tea spread to Korea from China together with Buddhism.

During the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910), however, Confucianism became Korea’s national religion and tea production, which had been intimately linked to Buddhist temples, disappeared as Buddhism fell into decline. From then on, Koreans applied their health knowledge to developing teas using medicinal ingredients. Along with Confucianist principles such as respecting one’s elders, the concept “food is medicine” became firmly ensconced in the minds of the Korean people, and medicinal teas became a staple.

The wikipedia article on Korean tea is also a good source for additional information.

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The Lotus is a very important symbol in India and of Buddhism. It refers to the complete purification of body, speech and mind, and the blossoming of wholesome deeds in liberation. The lotus refers to many aspects of the path, as it grows from the mud (samsara), up through muddy water it appears clean on the surface (purification), and finally produces a beautiful flower (enlightenment). The white blossom represents purity, the stem stands for the practice of Buddhist teachings which raise the mind above the (mud of) worldly existence, and gives rise to purity of mind. An open blossom signifies full enlightenment; a closed blossom signifies the potential for enlightenment.

- from a list of the Eight Auspicious Symbols of Buddhism on kalachakranet.org.

The lotus is a wonderful plant, imbued with a rich history in Eastern art and religious symbolism. The example image above shows the foot of Kuanyin (in the transitional style of Chinese/Tibetan sculpture between portrayals of the male Avalokitsvara and the later, distinctly female Kuanyin) on an open lotus flower. The lotus plant also graces some of the most stunning ponds in the world, shading the carp below with its broad, ruffle-edged leaves, distinctive seed pods and dramatic blooms. Interest in the lofty conceptual aspects of the lotus have attracted me to uses of the plant in foods and teas. So, in spite of my disappointing experience with Vietnamese lotus petal-infused green tea I agreed to taste some pure golden lotus flower (Jin Lian Hua) at New Century Tea House last weekend. I’m very glad that I gave it a chance, and I purchased one ounce of the tea, which in volume was much more than I expected, for drinking at home.

The liquor of this tisane is a lovely, bright orange-yellow with a pleasing scent. Upon first sip I noted the same distinctive lotus flavor that the tea blend has, but it is much mellower in taste. Subsequent sips revealed a very nice, warming flavor. It has no typical floral notes, but more of a vegetal fullness, unique to lotus. The tisane is made from whole golden lotus flowers, which may also contribute to the difference in flavor as the infusion with the green tea used only the petals. It was suggested that this tisane would be good to drink following a rich or very spicy meal. The day of the initial tasting it served as a nice, calming follow-up to a long sequence of caffeinated beverages.

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