A Winter Herbal Tea Blend From Appalachian Mountain Plants
How I blend a winter herbal tea from Appalachian mountain plants: white pine, spicebush, wintergreen and sweet birch, dried in the shed and jarred before frost.
The first hard frost usually comes to our creek the second or third week of October. You can smell it the night before, a cold mineral smell off the ridge, and by morning the jewelweed has gone to black mush and the spicebush along the branch has dropped its yellow leaves. That’s my signal. The drying shed gets swept, the screens come out, and I start putting up the plants that keep through winter.
Most of what I jar in fall is for the apothecary shelf. One batch isn’t. It’s a tea blend, four plants that grow within a half-mile of the house, and it’s what I put in a mug when the wood stove is going and the fog doesn’t lift until noon. My grandmother made it with whatever she had, and so do I.
I’ll tell you the blend, how to dry what goes in it, and what to know before you drink it. Every plant on the list has its own post here, and I’ll point you to each.
The four plants
I blend by volume, using a measuring cup. Everything is dry.
– ½ cup eastern white pine needles (Pinus strobus), snipped into half-inch pieces. White pine has needles in bundles of five, long and soft. I wrote up how to gather them in foraging white pine needles for winter tea.
– ¼ cup spicebush twigs (Lindera benzoin), cut into short pieces. The twigs smell warm and a little like allspice when you snap them. More on this one in how to forage spicebush.
– ¼ cup wintergreen leaves (Gaultheria procumbens), the glossy evergreen ground cover with red berries. My post on wintergreen in the mountains covers it.
– ¼ cup sweet birch twigs (Betula lenta), which smell exactly like wintergreen candy when scratched. See sweet birch twigs.
Shake it all together in a pint jar. That’s the entire blend, and it fills the jar about three-quarters of the way.
To drink it, put a heaping tablespoon in a cheesecloth bag, pour a mug of just-boiled water over it, cover the mug, and steep ten minutes. The pine comes first, clean and sharp. Then the spicebush rounds it with warmth, and the wintergreen and birch finish sweet, like the root beer my granddaddy used to make in a crock. It’s a good cup. It’s not a strong one, and I’d rather it were mild than muddy.
Drying what goes in
I dry everything on screens in the shed, out of the sun and out of the damp. Sun fades the plants and bleaches the flavor, and fog will undo a drying job faster than anything. Spread the pieces in a single layer, no deeper than an inch. Turn them once a day. Twigs and needles take about a week, sometimes ten days if it’s wet. Wintergreen leaves are thick and take longer.
You’ll know it’s done when a twig snaps clean instead of bending and a needle breaks rather than folds. If you aren’t sure, give it another two days. I lost half a jar of birch twigs my second year, because I jarred them before they were fully dry, and I opened the lid in January to find them furred with gray mold. A jar of mold is a lesson you only need once.
Use a clean, dry jar with a tight lid. My post on storing mountain herbs through a humid winter goes through how I keep them from going stale or moldy until spring, including the trick of labeling with the date.
What to know before you drink it
I’ll say this once and then trust you. Wintergreen and sweet birch both carry methyl salicylate, the same compound family as aspirin. If you’re allergic to aspirin, take a blood thinner, or are pregnant, skip those two and ask your own doctor. Even for everyone else, I treat this as a cup of tea now and then, not something to drink by the pot every day.
Identification matters more than anything on this list. White pine is safe to identify once you know the five-needle bundle, but there are evergreens that look like it and aren’t, yew being the one that should worry you. Never drink a tea from a plant you identified from a single source. Check it against two or three good guides, and if you can, go out with someone who has gathered it before. If you aren’t certain, leave it standing.
Gather lightly, too. Take a little from many branches rather than stripping one tree, and keep to ground you have permission to be on. Our Appalachian plants have been used for a long time by people who were here before my family. The Cherokee knew these woods first, and I credit them. If you want to read what has been documented, Paul Hamel and Mary Chiltoskey’s Cherokee Plants and Their Uses is where I’d start.
A tin for the neighbor
A small tin of this blend is the easiest gift I know, and the best one for someone who has everything. Fill a two-ounce tin, tuck in a couple of squares of cheesecloth and a bit of twine, and write the steeping directions on the lid. It costs you nothing but the afternoon. If you’d like to make something to go along with it, I put together a longer list in mountain apothecary holiday gifts you can make by hand.
Where to go from here
The tea is the easy part. Learning to know the plant on the hillside, in the right season and with the right look-alikes ruled out, takes longer and is the part worth doing carefully. That’s what I wrote Appalachian Medicinal Plants for. It walks through the plants of these mountains one at a time: how to identify each, when and how to gather it with care for the stand, and how it has traditionally been used. You can find it here: Appalachian Medicinal Plants.
