What Is Herbal Tea? A Guide to Tisanes, from Chamomile and Hibiscus to Rooibos and Butterfly Pea

That is why tea people prefer the word tisane (pronounced tee-ZAHN), borrowed from French. In everyday speech, though, “herbal tea” is what most people ask for, so we use both names in this guide.

Kausshal Dugarr, Teabox’s founder, put it plainly in 2014: “Tea comes from the leaves and buds of the plant Camellia sinensis.” Chamomile tea, ginger tea and ginseng tea, he wrote, are sold as herbal tea, which “is a concoction obtained from brewing various herbs or roots in a fashion similar to tea.” Our staff training module says the same thing in fewer words: these drinks “do not have Tea leaves (Camellia sinensis)” and are made from fruits, spices and herbs steeped in hot or cold water.

Black, green, white and oolong teas are all the same plant, made in different ways; our guide to types of tea explains how. A tisane can be made from almost any edible, aromatic part of a plant:

• Flowers: chamomile, hibiscus, butterfly pea and lavender.
• Leaves: peppermint, lemongrass and tulsi.
• Roots and bark: ginger and licorice root, and cinnamon bark.
• Seeds, fruit and peel: fennel seed, and amla, rosehip or orange peel.

Many of the best are blends of several. Our 2023 training deck describes a tisane as “typically a blend of fruits, flowers, roots, berries, seeds and even spices SANS TEA.”

Tisanes are not a modern fashion. A 2015 essay on our blog put it simply: brews of “flower petals, barks, roots, seeds, or fruits” have been drunk “for thousands of years,” and their recipes have followed the trends of every age.

That one fact changes how each is grown, how it tastes and how you brew it. Tea leaf is withered, rolled and often oxidized in a factory, and it can turn bitter if the water is too hot or the steep too long. Most herbs are simply dried, and they need full heat and time to give up their flavor.

When herbs and tea meet in one tin

The line blurs when herbs and tea meet in one tin. Chamomile blended with green tea is a flavored green tea, not a tisane, and it carries green tea’s caffeine. Our own Chamomile Green is a good example: it blends chamomile flowers with whole leaf green tea, and “we remove the stalks so that you enjoy the goodness of only the flowers.” Our product data rates it low in caffeine, not caffeine-free.

The same goes for Kashmiri kahwa, which is green tea with saffron and spices (see Kashmiri kahwa), and for every masala chai. Our 2014 myth-busting post called masala chai “a delicious example” of herbs and tea in one cup.

Herbs have been going into the teapot for well over a thousand years. Lu Yu, the Tang dynasty author of The Classic of Tea, complained that people of his day added “sweet onions, ginger, tangerine or orange peel, dogwood berries, pepper, mint and jujube”; a purist, he allowed only salt.

Rose is a good example. Our best-selling Mountain Rose Black is black tea with rose, jasmine and cardamom; in the run-up to Valentine’s Day 2022 it took 178 orders, which by our reckoning came to about 8 kg of rose in tea. More on these in Flavored tea blends.

We sell three of them as pure tisanes, Pure Chamomile, Hibiscus Lemongrass and Blue Amore butterfly pea, and our tasting notes, labels and recipes for each are in the companion guide.

Our own herbal chais, Abhay Ras and Soma, draw on that tradition, and in 2022 our blenders turned the Indian summer sharbat into iced tisanes.

That makes tisanes a popular evening choice, or a choice for anyone cutting back. Check the label: if it lists green tea, black tea or Camellia sinensis, the cup has caffeine. For comparison, Tea 101 puts a cup of black tea at about 50 mg and green tea at about 20 to 45 mg, though it varies with the leaf, the amount, the water temperature and the steeping time. More in Caffeine in tea.

How to read a caffeine label

Every Teabox product page carries a caffeine rating. Our three pure tisanes, Pure Chamomile, Hibiscus Lemongrass and Butterfly Blue Pea, are rated “Caffeine Free,” while every one of our flavored green teas, chamomile and mint among them, is rated “Low,” because there is green tea in the tin. When we launched our 2022 summer tisanes, we put it in numbers on the pack: “0% caffeine and no added sugars at all.”

A name can mislead. A tin with “chamomile” or “tulsi” in its name may still be a green tea, so read the ingredient list, not just the front of the pack.

Natural is not the same as right for everyone

“Natural” does not automatically mean right for everyone. Herbs are plants with active compounds, and a 2016 piece on our blog noted that some herbal teas can cause problems “in combination with each other, medications and laxatives, and through oversteeping and high dosages.” The same piece pointed out that “natural” on a flavor label only means it contains something that can be found in nature; it takes 200 kilograms of bergamot fruit from Calabria and Sicily, for instance, to make one kilo of real bergamot essence.

People with plant allergies should take care too; chamomile, for example, belongs to the daisy family. Read the whole ingredient list as well: our Hibiscus Lemongrass Tisane includes licorice, and Soma Ayurvedic Chai includes ashwagandha, so if you have been told to avoid a particular herb, look for it by name.

Herbal tea is not a treatment for any illness. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, take regular medication or have a health condition, ask your doctor which herbal teas suit you, and see Tea during pregnancy. Keep tisanes, and especially herbal essential oils, away from pets: as our writer Peter GW Keen found, “Many herbal leaves are safe; their extracted essences aren’t,” and an essential oil can be “500–2,000 times” as concentrated as the leaf. See Tea and Herbs: For You, Fine. For Your Cat, Never.

Unlike green or white tea, herbs need full heat and time to release their flavor, and most will not turn bitter if you leave them a little longer.