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Welcome back to Beyond the Bag. Today we are going to look at how to make homemade mint tea. I am going to show you how to go from fresh live mint to this tasty homemade tea.
While the dried form of this tea is quite good, the fresh version takes things to a whole new level. To make this you will need a source of fresh mint. I have a fair-sized bush of it growing right outside my step. One nice or not so nice thing about growing mint is its prolific rate of spreading. I would recommend planting it in a pot or an area where you don’t mind it taking over quite a bit.
Ideally, you want a healthy mint plant relatively free of discolored or sickly leaves. When picking from a mint plant, I recommend choosing younger stems with a good number of leaves trying to avoid damaged or discolored leaves. You can use scissors or a knife for this process, but as I am demonstrating, your hands work just fine as well. Take a bit more than you think you will need, once we de-stem and chop them up they will be much smaller.
Next, we are going to remove the good leaves from the stems. I would make 2 piles, one of the good leaves without damage or discoloration and another with the stems, flowers, bad leaves and anything else we don’t want going into the tea. Once you are finished de-stemming and sorting, discard everything but the good leaves.
Next, we are going to bring together the leaves and we are going to take a knife and dice them finely. Try to do this gently without bruising or crushing the leaves. This takes a soft but firm touch, so don’t feel pressure to rush things. The reason we are dicing the leaves is to increase the surface area of the leaves and create freshly cut edges. The freshly cut edges allow for the liquids inside the leaves to bleed into the hot water. This is what separates the fresh and dried forms of this tea.
Once the leaves are diced it is time to steep them. I am going to be using this glass teapot with a metal mesh infuser. We are going to add the fresh leaves to the infuser and then add some hot water. Now we are going to let this sit for at least 5 min but as long as your water is staying hot you can easily take it all the way to 15 plus minutes. Peppermint won’t go bitter and thus the tea will only get stronger with time. Once the tea has reached a sufficient level of steeping it is ready to serve. Cheers!
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