My Evening Cup of Herbal Tea and the Sampler Behind It

Most evenings, around nine o'clock, I pour myself one last cup of tea before I close the kitchen down. The kettle goes on, I pick a tea bag from the box on the counter, and for about ten minutes I just sit with it. Lately that box is a Celestial Seasonings herbal tea sampler, and it has become a small part of my evening routine. The mug is an old stoneware one with a chip in the rim, and the chair I sit in faces the back porch where the herbs hang to dry. That is the whole ritual. Nothing fancy, nothing that promises to fix anything. Just a warm cup and a quiet end to the day.

I am Marlene. I have grown and dried my own herbs for about twenty years, learned most of what I know from my grandmother, and I keep four raised beds of peppermint, lemon balm, chamomile, calendula, thyme, rosemary, and sage beside the back porch. I built the first bed in the spring of 2005, the year Ray brought home the cedar boards from the mill, and I have filled it every year since. So I was a little slow to buy a box of tea bags. It felt like cheating on the garden.

But there are evenings when I do not want to go out to the porch, pick leaves, and wait for them to steep. There are evenings when I want something already made, already blended, and already caffeine free. That is where the Celestial Seasonings Herbal Tea Sampler came in.

This is not a cure-all tea. It will not cure anything, and I would not tell you otherwise. What it does is give you eighteen tea bags of different caffeine free herb blends, which means you get to find out, one evening at a time, which herbs you actually reach for when you are tired.

What the sampler really gave me was a way to taste my way through the herb cabinet without filling my own cabinet with whole boxes I might not like.

The box holds eighteen tea bags, and each one is a different blend. That is the part I like best. With a regular box you are committing to thirty or forty bags of one flavor. With the sampler, you get one honest try at each blend. If chamomile is not your evening tea, you have not wasted a month of it.

I started keeping a little notebook. Nothing formal, just a spiral bound book on the butcher block table. I would write the name of the blend, what it smelled like dry, what it tasted like with a little honey, and whether I would buy a full box. On a Tuesday in early October I tried the chamomile blend with a spoon of honey from the farmers market and wrote 'yes' next to it in the notebook. After three weeks I had a list of two or three blends I genuinely looked forward to, and a few I will probably never buy again.

That is the honest part of this review. Not every blend in the sampler is going to be your cup of tea, and that is exactly the point. You are paying for the chance to sort that out with eighteen small samples instead of eighteen full boxes.

The other thing I appreciate is that every bag in the Celestial Seasonings sampler is caffeine free. That matters to me more now than it did ten years ago. I can drink a cup at nine and not lie awake at eleven counting the ceiling beams. If you are sensitive to caffeine, or if you are cutting back for the afternoon and evening, that is a practical detail worth knowing.

And because I am a home herbalist, I will tell you what I tell everyone who asks about store bought tea: read the box. Celestial Seasonings prints the ingredients on the back, and most of the blends are simple, recognizable herbs. The peppermint one lists peppermint and little else, and on a January night when the garden is under six inches of snow, that bag tastes close enough to summer. If you grow peppermint and chamomile yourself, you will recognize most of what is in the bag. That is the standard I care about.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were sitting at my kitchen table with a mug in your hands, I would tell you this. The Celestial Seasonings Herbal Tea Sampler is a good, honest way to find out which caffeine free herbal teas you actually like, and at eighteen bags it is a reasonable place to start. It is not a cure for anything, and anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling you.

I would also tell you to keep your expectations plain. A tea bag is a tea bag. It is not a substitute for the herbs you grow, and it is not better than them either. It is simply a different tool for a different evening. Some nights I still go out to the porch and pick fresh lemon balm. Some nights I reach for the box. Both are fine.

And if you take anything from this, let it be this: the sampler is a way to learn your own taste. Write down what you like, buy a full box of the one or two that win, and let the rest go. That is what I did, and it is the same advice my grandmother gave me about herbs in general. Start small, pay attention, and keep what works.