Horehound: ultimate no-caffeine tea if you love BITTER

Cafe Society
1

I love bitter flavors and often find them in three forms that can be both highly pleasurable and inconvenient, depending on the time of day: Alcohol and coffee and tea.

I love hoppy beers and a strong draft of tea, but these are going to get you drunk or make you wide awake. Sadly, decaff tea just isn’t very good, and decaff coffee still has enough caffeine in it to affect me.

A tisane of horehound is a great substitute. Most herbal teas are not bitter; horehound is intensely bitter. It also has a very subtle and complex flavor/aroma that goes beyond most other herbs for decoction. That flavor, of course, has been celebrated in the form of horehound candy for centuries. Horehound is extremely cheap and can be bought by weight in better health food stores.

But here’s extra I discovered: horehound and elderberry make a superb combination! The rich, thick sweet elderberry matches the bitter horehound perfectly. Give it a try.

Horehound has for me an added benefit. I am prone to PVCs, but horehound helps calm my heart (literally). Reading about the herb on various sites backs up this claim (apparently not mumbo-jumbo but scientificially proven). However, in large doses horehound can have the opposite effect on the heart, so check with your doctor and all those kinds of caveats. Elderberry is supposed to be all-around great for health and healing, but again check with your doc for details.

Any other horehound fans? Any other favorite herbal tisanes and formulae? Thanks in advance for your responses.

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I didn’t know horehound was used as a tea. I like the little horehound candy sticks.

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I assume you’re using elderberry berries? Yummy. Not for use during pregnancy, though. Also, if underripe and/or raw, they may give you a tummy ache, vomitting or diarrhea due to the presence of cyanogenic glycosides. But cooked or in teas, there’s nothing yummier.

Then again, horehound itself is contraindicated in pregnancy, because it’s an emmenagogue and uterine stimulant. So if you get knocked up, lay off the tea!

You want bitter? Try some gentian! Just one drop of gentian tincture post meal will trigger a bile release like you never dreamed. I used it to help me get over the “after meal” cigarette when I quit smoking.

My favorite herbal tea is nettles, red clover, schizandra berries and chinese licorice. Sweet and mellow, and oh, so nourishing. But right now I’m on mostly galactagogues, so fennel, anise, cardamom and nettles are my best friends. Fairly tasty, but sort of blah.