Almost everyone who tells us they do not like lavender tea has had it made badly. It is a genuinely easy drink to ruin, and there are only two ways to do it: the wrong lavender, or too long in the water.
Fix both and it stops tasting like a bar of soap and starts tasting like a flower.
The basic method
- One teaspoon of dried culinary lavender buds per cup. Less than you would use for a leaf tea. Lavender behaves more like rosemary than like tea.
- Water just off the boil — around 95°C. Straight from a roaring boil scorches it.
- Steep four to five minutes. Not ten. This is the step everyone gets wrong.
- Strain and taste before you sweeten. Honey suits it. Sugar tends to flatten it.
That is the whole recipe. Everything below is refinement.
Why over-steeping ruins it
Lavender's sweet floral compounds come out of the buds fast. Camphor comes out slowly. Leave it in for ten minutes and you have extracted the medicinal part on top of the pleasant part.
If your lavender tea has ever tasted like a spa smells, that is what happened. Pull the buds at five minutes and it will not.
Use culinary lavender, not craft lavender
This matters more than the brewing.
The lavender sold in bunches, sachets and craft shops is nearly always Grosso, a lavandin bred for scent and long stems. It is high in camphor. Excellent in a drawer, unpleasant in a cup.
Culinary lavender is English lavender, lower in camphor and noticeably sweeter. Ours is Superblue, grown in its own rows and cut for the kitchen rather than for bouquets. If you are buying lavender to drink or bake with, check which one you are getting — a lot of shops do not say.
Fresh or dried?
Dried is better, and not only for convenience. Drying concentrates the flavour, and dried buds are far easier to measure consistently.
If you are using fresh from the garden, use roughly three times as much by volume, and pick before the flowers are fully open — that is when the oil content is highest.
Four blends worth knowing
Chamomile and lavender
The classic evening cup, and the blend most people end up making permanently. Chamomile is rounder and slightly apple-like; it fills in underneath lavender and takes the sharp edge off it.
Equal parts, or two parts chamomile to one part lavender if you are new to it. Five minutes. Both are caffeine-free, so it works late.
Earl Grey with lavender
Bergamot and lavender are natural companions — both citrus-adjacent, both floral. Add about a quarter teaspoon of buds to a pot of Earl Grey and brew as normal.
This one takes milk, which straight lavender tea does not really. Note that it is no longer caffeine-free.
Lavender and mint
Brighter and more awake than the chamomile version. Good hot, better cold. Two parts mint to one part lavender; the mint will otherwise lose.
Lavender milk tea
Brew at double strength — two teaspoons per cup of water — for five minutes, strain, then top with warm milk and a little honey. Oat milk works particularly well; its sweetness sits right next to the lavender.
For an iced version, brew double strength, cool completely, then pour over ice and add cold milk.
Iced lavender tea
Do not brew it hot and pour it over ice — you will dilute it into nothing.
- Double-strength method: brew at two teaspoons per cup, steep five minutes, strain, cool, then pour over ice.
- Cold brew: one tablespoon of buds per litre of cold water, in the fridge for six to eight hours, then strain. Softer and sweeter, with almost no camphor at all. This is the better of the two.
A squeeze of lemon turns lavender iced tea slightly pink, which is a party trick worth knowing.
Lavender syrup, for everything else
Equal parts sugar and water, heated until the sugar dissolves. Take it off the heat, add a tablespoon of buds per cup of syrup, cover, and leave for twenty minutes. Strain and refrigerate.
That syrup goes into lemonade, iced tea, coffee, cocktails and whipped cream, and keeps a few weeks in the fridge. If you would rather skip the step, we make it.
Is lavender tea caffeine-free?
Yes. Lavender is a herb, not a tea plant, so a pure lavender infusion has no caffeine in it at all. The same goes for a chamomile-and-lavender blend.
The exception is anything blended with actual tea — Earl Grey, black, green — which brings its own caffeine along.
On “benefits”
Lavender has been drunk as an infusion for a very long time, and you will find a lot of confident claims about what it does. We are a farm, not a laboratory, and we are not going to add to them.
What we will say: it is a caffeine-free hot drink that most people find pleasant late in the evening, and that is a perfectly good reason to have it.
If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, taking medication, or giving it to a young child, ask your doctor or pharmacist first. Herbal does not mean inert, and they will give you a better answer than a search result will.
Storing it
Airtight, and dark. Light is what takes the flavour out of dried lavender — not time. A sealed tin in a cupboard holds up for a year or more; a clear jar on a sunny windowsill will be flat in a few months, however pretty it looks there.
What we grow
Our lavender tea is young Superblue blossom, cut and dried on our farm in Richmond, British Columbia. The same lavender goes into our loose edible buds for baking, and our lavender sugar.
The rest of the kitchen range is on the culinary and pantry page.