Wild Tea: Grow, gather, brew & blend 40 ingredients & 30 recipes for healthful herbal teas

by Nick Moyle, Richard Hood

Discover the incredible uses of 40 home-grown and foraged ingredients for making a variety of original brew-it-yourself recipes. You will learn how to grow, find, harvest, dry, and store ingredients including berries, roots, seeds, leaves, and flowers--plus the profile of history, health benefits, parts of the plant to use, and how to brew singly. The 30 recipes are for complex blends and specialty drinks such as detox teas, class night-time brews, Moroccan mint, Korean barley tea, bubble tea, and even dandelion coffee. Step-by-step detailed instructions are given for each recipe. There is also a "best of the rest" section with more unique ingredients that can be added to your brews, such as ginger, cinnamon, pomegranate, and orange. Enjoy the satisfaction and health benefits of brewing your own natural teas!

Genres: Tea, Nonfiction, Food, Gardening, Plants

174 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 23, 2020

Reviews

[Rachel Nevada Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I checked out this book from the library because I am new to gardening and knew I wanted to start with a simple herb/tea garden, but wasn't sure what would be good to grow.

I also had checked out Growing Your Own Tea Garden: The Guide to Growing and Harvesting Flavorful Teas in Your Backyard. Growing Your Own Tea Garden seemed to focus a bit more on growing an actual tea tree and I was looking to start with more herbal blends (I have yet to convince myself that I won't kill anything I attempt to grow, so a tea tree is a bit out of my league at the moment).

Wild Tea was exactly what I was looking for! The book is broken into five sections. The first, the introduction, provides a brief overview to drying and prepping ingredients. As another reviewer stated, this section of the book is a little sparse and I'll likely do a bit more research on drying and storing tea before diving in. The next section is a selection of Top 40 Tea Ingredients. Each ingredient has notes about where to forage it (or how to grow it), how to prep it for tea, and what other herbs it goes well with. It's not really clear how this section is organized, but the table of contents makes navigating it relatively easy. Following this section is an abbreviated list of ingredients with shorter notes from the authors. Then there's a list of recommended tea blends and pairings and finally some bougie-er tea based drinks (think milk tea, tumeric lattes, spiced hot chocolate, frappes).

I found myself taking copious notes while reading and finally just taking photos of recipes I wanted to try out. Because of this I'll likely purchase the book (which should be helpful when I am finally ready to branch out beyond my initial, basic ingredients).

[Cad0420 · Rating 3 out of 5]

TLDR; Good book to get to know wild tea, but not enough.

I got this book from my local library. The book is beautiful, with a lot of nice pictures of flowers. However, it doesn’t cover enough to convey the subject “Wild Tea”.

First of all, the preparation part is very short. It doesn’t tell me enough information of how exactly to dry the herbs or flowers, how to enjoy them. A single blog article online would probably be more detailed than this chapter of this book.

Secondly, it is not the same concept as I thought of “wild”. Some ingredients are home grown, and some are found actually in grocery store. Others are not easily found in North America. I guess it is because the authors are in UK, so that’s OK. But thinking about “wild tea”, I would think more of dandelion (covered in this book), cornflowers, clovers...Real wildflowers or leaves that can be more easily found in the wild. I don’t think I can easily found Lavender or Rosemary in the wild. But again, possibly it is because of the location differences.

Also some pictures only show the look of the plants, not how it looks like as a tea.

It is still a good book to get to know wild tea and diy herbal tea. But to really start your own drink, you still need Google.

[Patricia Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love, love, love this book. It's full of beautiful color photographs, tips for growing, harvesting, and recipes. It doesn't include every herb in the world. Maybe you can't make tea out of every herb in the world or maybe you shouldn't!!

Here's one of my favorites:

"CATNIP This member of the mint family makes a decent, minty-tasting tea with a slight hint of citrus. Use 1–2 teaspoons of dried flowers per cup. Cat-owning home-based workers should avoid perching a glass of catnip tea beside their laptop for obvious reasons."

I usually just save catnip for my cats. They love fresh catnip and it gives me pleasure to enjoy their happiness.

[Cherie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited for this book; it's beautiful, it has a nice layout on how to grow the herbs, forage, make into tea, health benefits, etc. However, the one thing that really put me aback was that a lot of herbs didn't have some really obvious health benefits listed. Obviously, you can't list them all, but there were some glaring omissions. I am not an herbalist, but I know about some herbs that help with some of my health issues, and I was really surprised and it made me wonder what else this book was missing.

[Tom Fordham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of awesome information about foraging and growing your own tea ingredients, including how to dry them and blend them. As a tea lover and someone with an interest in foraging and becoming self-sufficient this is a must have.

[(a)lyss(a) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what I expected from this book, but it was ok. There weren't a lot of pictures or information about each blend. There was quite a few recipes and most were pretty standard. There was also some information on uses for various ingredients. Overall an ok read.

[Emma Parker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very informative, the bit about puzzleweed got a genuine smile.