No Half Measures

23 Jul 2024

The first time I had mint tea I was very skeptical. I was a senior in high school on a school trip to Spain and Morocco. We were in a Moroccan restaurant for lunch, and they served us mint tea in an elegant silver teapot. I have never been a fan of mint - the only minty thing I tolerate is toothpaste, because all of the non-mint flavors taste worse. But I tried the mint tea, and I really liked it!

Fast forward many years, and I want to make mint tea of my own. I experimented for a while, but the recipe I settled on is simple:

• 1.5 L boiling water
• 4 Stash Super Mint tea bags
• 1/2 c sugar (or 3/4 c if you prefer it sweeter)

Instructions: add all ingredients, pour in boiling water, stir the sugar until dissolved, steep several hours or overnight.

We go through roughly one 100-count box of tea bags per year, so this summer I went to order more and discovered that Stash is discontinuing their Super Mint tea. So what else is there to do except order 360 tea bags? This small health store in Canada must have been a bit perplexed, but that’s three years of tea for us!

As I was telling this sad tale to my friends, one mentioned that the mint in her garden was doing fantastic this year, and she wondered if I could use that for tea.

Why not! What a cool idea! My mint doesn’t like the heavy clay soil in our yard, so it always dries out in July. I went over and got a huge armful of mint and started researching how to dry it. I mostly followed this guide, choosing the oven method because it might be too humid here to hang-dry it, and by the time I started searching for methods I had already taken all the leaves off the stems.

I had so many leaves that I decided to stack them using cooling racks. I also had to rig our oven to stay open with a measuring cup while also pressing the lever to keep the oven running - dang smart appliances!

After a day of working in a delightfully minty house, we were getting somewhere! The top layers, which were on cooling racks with long legs, were dry and crispy. The short cooling racks were nowhere near done, so I swapped them out.

The top layers were definitely ready to crumble!

I’m using my trusty mason jars to store the leaves, to no one’s surprise.

It took another few hours for the rest of the leaves to dry, without mishap.

Then comes the real test! If I make mint tea from these leaves using the same method, how does it compare to the Super Mint tea bags?

First, I needed to know how much dried leaves to use. I emptied a less-favored tea to measure the contents, and the tea weighed 2 grams. Since I use 4 tea bags for a half-gallon jar, I measured out 8g of dried mint leaves.

I let the tea steep overnight like I usually do for the tea bags. The color turned out the same as the tea bags, which was encouraging.

Since this tea is being brewed loose-leaf, I knew I would have to strain it.

So, how does it stack up?

The color is slightly darker than the tea bags, and the minty flavor is slightly more intense. But overall it is a very similar flavor, so I would call this a ringing success!