Making a delicious cup of tea with loose leaf herbs is simple and easy. Brewing loose leaves is a traditional art with many different styles and varying items of tea brewing equipment on the market. There are one cup teaballs that can be filled with loose leaves, flowers, and barks and submerged straight into a boiling cup of hot water and then left to infuse. The rule of thumb with brewing loose leaves is to allow them to fully release their beneficial aromatic phyto-chemical content.

This process is lovingly called brewing and takes 5-10 minutes so a tea cosy is recommended if you are using a pot. When making a pot of tea it is advised that you use one teaspoon of loose leaf tea per person and one for the pot. Any true tea maker who truly appreciates the art would recommend heating the pot first, and of course when the tea is fully infused it is absolutely necessary that the drinker sits down and takes a minute to enjoy! For full instructions go to our How to make Herbal Tea Page.

Our Estonian Wild Crafted Chaga can be brewed into a tea. Heat in water over a low heat (160°F or 75°C) to extract the phyto-chemicals of this medicinal mushroom. Brew for up to an hour, (will turn a deep brown colour, then drink). The same Chaga can be re-used until the water extracted from the chunk is pale in colour.

Serving:

1 - 2 teaspoons of Wild Crafted Chaga per cup is usually sufficient for one cup of Chaga tea. Remember that the Chaga can be reused.

Wild Crafted Chaga from Indigo Herbs are harvested from Birch trees in Estonia. Only mature Chaga mushrooms are harvested and smaller immature Chaga fungal growth is left until it has reached an acceptable size for harvesting. The Chaga mushroom grows high up on the Birch tree, and is picked in spring and summer. The mushroom absorbs the nutrients and compounds from the tree and makes it more available to humans. Chaga lives in a symbiotic relationship with the birch tree. The experienced fungus expert will break off the Chaga conk (the piece of fungal matter exposed on the trunk or tree branch) with his/her hand and taken back to be prepared for drying. If there is no sun available then the Chaga is usually dehydrated at a temperature no less than 40.5°C. The drying process is done as quickly as possible to insure that no other bacteria or fungus can grow on the Chaga matter. The pure fungus is then broken down to make small Chaga pieces and coarse powder.

There are no known side effects to date from consuming Chaga.