4 Great Reasons to Brew Em's Herbal Teas
Healing herbs are marketed in many forms, including capsules and tablets, alcohol-based tinctures and other concentrated liquid extracts, as well tea bags and loose herbs, sold singly or as blends. Em’s Herbals keeps a special focus on loose single herbs and tea blends featuring just a handful of ingredients.
Concentrated herbal products offer convenience: swallowing pills is quick, and familiar to most of us from experience taking standard over the counter and prescription medicines.
Squeezing a dropper from a bottle of tincture or fluid extract, into a little water or directly into the mouth, is also fast and easy. And brewing tea with a tea bag involves a bit less effort than brewing and straining loose herbs.
So why bother with making tea, using loose herbs?
1. Know what you’re taking.
You can see, smell, and taste the herb, and get a clear sense of what it is, and its quality and freshness. A fancy way of saying that is that herbs delivered in this form provide a unique opportunity to perform a neuroleptic assay—to use your senses to evaluate the product. That means that you don’t have to simply take it on faith that the product contains what the label says, and whether the plant material is still fresh and potent!
In this way you can check the appearance, fragrance, and taste of healing herbs through direct experience. (Unfortunately, many packaged botanical and nutritional products have been tested and shown to contain little or none of the ingredients shown on their labels. “Let the buyer beware” is a useful caution in this industry.)
Pills can be most deceiving, of course, since they are rarely tasted at all, and their appearance is seldom distinctive. The taste of alcohol is often the dominant flavor note in tinctures, and extracts of the same herb may vary considerably in their potency between different producers, and even between different batches from the same source. Tea bags are handy to use, and at least you can taste what you’re ingesting, but the actual plant matter is hidden from view.
With loose herbal tea, there’s nowhere to hide! What you see, smell, and taste, is exactly what you’re getting. Certified organic herbs, in a form you can identify: that’s the kind of transparency that empowers you, as an informed consumer.
And if you want to take your self-care to another level by extracting and preserving high quality dried organic herbs in the form of your own tinctures, oils, liniments, salves, or other products, the Em’s Herbals line offers you the perfect starting materials for those projects! We work with suppliers and growers—mostly in our own local region, the Pacific Northwest—to obtain some of the very best available herbs for you and your family.
2. Increase your intake of liquids.
A great many health conditions that users want to address with healing herbs will be directly improved by drinking more water at the same time!
Obvious examples of concerns that may respond to increased water intake include
• colds, coughs, flus, and hay fever symptoms
• urinary tract infections (UTIs) or other inflammations
• digestive upsets, especially when fluids are lost through vomiting or diarrhea
• headaches and other pain issues
• simple fatigue
Healthy pregnancy and breastfeeding definitely require optimal hydration, and a mineral-rich, sugar-free herbal tea, like Em’s Herbals Mommy to Be, is an ideal aid for these crucial phases of mother-and-baby’s life.
Combining appropriate herbs with additional water, in the form of tea, can be an excellent and practical way to reduce or alleviate symptoms and promote health.
3. Keep it simple!
Some herbal products that combine a dozen or more herbs in their formulas, so the activity of each ingredient may be very diluted, and the combined action of a complicated combination may be very hard to evaluate. On the other hand, Emily has designed each of our herbal blends to focus on just a few botanicals, each with a strong history of use for a particular concern or body system (sometimes adding one mostly to enhance the flavor and drinkability of the tea!).
4. Take a few minutes for yourself.
Whether you’re coping with an acute episode, hoping for help with a chronic issue, or just up against the daily grind, taking a moment for the simple ritual of brewing, steeping, straining, and drinking herbal tea can be a refreshing way to claim a bit of time out in your busy day.
The rushing around, the urgent tasks, the constantly shifting focus on various everyday business or family matters, can take up so much of our lives these days. All that often plays a huge role in creating the stress that makes us far more vulnerable to feeling sick, run down, or hurting.
Slow down! Step away from the screen.
Put the kettle on.
Pour the steaming water into your teapot.
Pause, and enjoy the fragrance of the herbs as they steep.
Pour and strain the tea into your cup.
Sip. Breathe. Things are going to get better…
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