When making a herbal tea, most people will think either 1. put the stuff in a teapot or 2. just throw them in the cup you’re using – I’ve done both but I have found some other methods which I use too depending on what the tea is for.

If you have a cold for example, you’ll want the lemon, ginger, thyme etc in the cup so you can actually smell the ingredients and get the added benefits but what if you are after the goodness without the green stuff actually floating about in your brew? Let me ask you a question – do you make coffee? Do you use a cafetiere? Have you ever thought about using it to make your herbal teas? I have and it works great!

I love making herbal honey chai tea but I find all the ‘bits’ leave a pretty nasty herb soup at the bottom of my cup so I decided to give this a try and it worked a treat thanks to the filter! I just left it to infuse for a few minutes, pushed the plunger and was able to enjoy my cuppa without all the floaters getting in the way!

GENIUS! I thought to myself – why hadn’t I thought of this before? Well actually there is a reason for that which I’ll show you next.

One of my favourite kitchen items is my herbal infuser teapot and it’s great when you want the goodness without needing to have leaves or bits actually in your cup:

This is what I used to make my cleavers and lemon balm tea this morning.

All methods work well but it does depend on what you are wanting from your tea. I also like to mix up herbal teabags this way too – I’m not so keen on green tea on it’s own so I’ll mix in a bag of something I actually like the taste of and get the benefits that way!

What’s your favourite herbal tea?!