By Moonroot, blended by hand.
Every herb in our tea is cut, never powdered. Here's what grinding does to a herb, and why we put up with the extra work it takes not to.
What grinding does to a herb
A herb keeps a lot of its smell in oils held inside the leaf, the petal or the seed. While the piece is whole, most of that stays put.
Grind it to powder and you break the whole thing open at once. The oils start escaping the moment it's ground. A powder that's sat in a warehouse, then a shop, then a cupboard has been losing its smell the whole time, long before it reaches your cup.
Powder also hides what's in it. Once something's dust, you can't tell a chamomile flower from its stalk, or a fresh leaf from an old one.
What cut and sifted means
We cut every herb to pieces between 0.5 and 3.0 mm, then sift out the dust. You can see what each piece is. That's the point.
Seeds get different treatment. Fennel, caraway and anise are lightly cracked, not ground, so they open up in the cup without turning to powder. We do it with a rolling pin, two passes and no more.
Our rule for when to stop is simple. If you can smell it strongly across the room, you've crushed too far.
Every incoming herb also has to be dried to under 10% moisture before it goes anywhere near a blend.
The trade-off we accepted
Cut herbs take up room. A flat paper tea bag won't hold 2.80 g of whole flowers, leaves and root chips, so we use a pyramid of plant-based mesh with space inside for the herbs to open up once the water hits them.
It's slower, too. Our first batch is filled and sealed by hand. We weigh the blend in batches, not bag by bag, and every twentieth bag goes back on the scale to check it's 2.80 g, give or take 0.05 g.
All of that costs more than tipping powder into a machine. We think it's worth it, because the cup tastes of the herbs and you can see exactly what you're drinking.
How to smell the difference for yourself
Open one of our bags next to an ordinary supermarket tea bag and smell both dry. Then look at them in the light. One shows you whole pieces, and the other usually shows you brown dust.
Then brew them the same way, 90°C, covered, five minutes, and taste them again once they've cooled to around 40°C. Bitterness and staleness hide in a hot cup and show themselves as it cools. Our brewing guide walks through the method.
For one herb up close, see how to tell good dried valerian from tired valerian. The same checks work for almost anything you'd put in a cup.
You can't check what you can't see, so we've made sure you can see it.
All four of our blends are cut, sifted and packed this way. See the four blends
Safety. Herbal infusion. Not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication, preparing for surgery, or managing a medical condition, consult a healthcare professional before use. Keep out of reach of children. Each blend carries its own warnings on the box. Please read them before you brew.