How to Make Homemade Mint Tea

Welcome back to Beyond the Bag. Today we are going to look at how to make a delicious fresh mint tea. I'm going to show you how to go from fresh live mint to this homemade tasty 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. Personally, 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 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 ones. 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 two piles. One of the good leaves, without any damage or discoloration, and the other with the stems, flowers, bad leaves, and anything else we don't want to go 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. It 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 the 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, 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! Thanks for watching. If you liked the video, please give us a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss any of our future videos. You can also find additional content on our social media and blog.