Blending your own tea from what you already have

Most articles about blending your own tea start by telling you to buy twelve jars of loose herbs. This one does not. If you already own three or four teas, you already own a blending kit — and combining what is in the cupboard is how you find out what you actually like before spending anything.

The structure: base, accent, top note

Blenders think in three parts, and the proportions matter more than the ingredients.

• Base — most of the cup. Something mild with body that will not fight anything: rooibos, honeybush, moringa, plain fruit blends.
• Accent — the character. Ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, mint, chamomile, hibiscus.
• Top note — a small amount of something bright or aromatic that you notice first. Citrus peel, vanilla, a little more mint.

Start at three parts base to one part accent. That sounds cautious and it is: almost every first attempt at blending is ruined by too much of the interesting thing. Once that works, try 2:1:1.

You can blend tea bags too

This is the part that gets left out. Blending is usually written about as a loose-leaf hobby, but two bags in one large mug is a blend, and it is the easiest possible way to experiment. Use a big mug or a small pot, one bag of each, and steep as normal.

Bags are the low-risk way in. If a combination is wrong you have wasted two bags, not a jar of herbs.

Five combinations worth trying

All of these are things we sell, so you can test the idea without buying anything unfamiliar.

• Rooibos + Chocolate — the dessert one. Rooibos carries chocolate better than anything else because both are naturally sweet and neither is sharp. Takes milk.
• Hibiscus + Mango — over ice. Hibiscus brings the acidity, mango brings the sweetness, and each fixes what is missing in the other.
• Ginger + Apple & Cinnamon — an improvised chai. Two thirds apple and cinnamon, one third ginger, or it turns fierce.
• Mint + Chocolate — after dinner, and exactly what it sounds like.
• Karoo Rooibos + Golden Paradise — the loose-leaf version. Plain rooibos as the base, turmeric and ginger as the accent.

What clashes

Worth knowing before you waste anything.

• Two strong accents together. Ginger and hibiscus, or mint and cinnamon, do not blend — they take turns. You get one, then the other, and neither is improved.
• Hibiscus with anything creamy. Its acidity fights vanilla, chocolate and honey. It belongs with fruit.
• Mint with almost any spice. Cooling and warming cancel out and leave something oddly flat.
• Three accents and no base. The most common mistake after over-dosing. Something has to carry the others.

Keep notes, because you will not remember

Write down what went in and in what proportion, on your phone or a card in the cupboard. Blending is iterative — the second attempt at a combination is nearly always better than the first, and only if you know what the first one was. Note the steep time too; a blend that is good at four minutes can be unbalanced at eight, because its parts do not give up their flavour at the same rate.

One thing we will not do here

Most articles on this subject give you blends named for what they are supposed to fix — a sleep blend, a digestion blend, a detox blend. We do not, because we cannot tell you a tea will do any of that, and a recipe named for an outcome is a promise about your body dressed up as a recipe.

What we can tell you is what things taste like together, which is the part that is actually true and the part that decides whether you drink it twice.

If you are pregnant, do not improvise. Our Expecting collection is curated ingredient by ingredient rather than just filtered for caffeine, and combining teas puts ingredients together that were never assessed as a combination. Stick to the single products in that collection and ask your midwife or doctor.

Where to start

Pick a base and one accent from the full range and use the 3:1 rule. If you want the mechanics of steeping first, they are in how to brew herbal tea, and the families that pair well are set out in types of tea.

Everything here is caffeine-free, so there is no combination that will keep you up.