Benefits Guide: How Do I Brew The Best Kratom Tea?

The Best Kratom Tea

One of the most common questions we get is how to make kratom tea better. We love answering this because it’s the core of what we do and gives us a chance to discuss kratom tea benefits.

We’re constantly testing ways to make kratom tea better.One day we’re studying steep time. The next it’s brew equipment. Flavor is the ever-present consideration. And when we find something meaningful, you’re the first to know!

In this post we’ll share some of the latest discoveries from the Top Tree test kitchen. To set the stage, the best kratom tea is made with kratom tea bags.

Unless you’re getting expertly made kratom tea from a local kava bar, step one for amazing kratom tea is ditching the powder and diving into the wonderful world of kratom tea bags.

What You’ll Learn

We’ll start with a quick review of how to make kratom tea in general. We’ve helped a lot of people dial in the brew process, so we know the common mistakes.

Whether it’s brew time, temperature, or using too few tea bags, most problems can be fixed with a simple adjustment.

After that we’ll give you an overview our favorite brew technique – step one for making kratom tea better. Then we’ll explain the benefits of viewing kratom tea making as an art – a creative process that depends on a willingness to experiment.

We’ll wrap up with a few final pro-tips for making kratom tea better. If you’re already an experienced kratom tea drinker, you should skip to the pro-tips (#1 is breaking news from our ongoing kratom tea research project with Dr. Grundmann & Santé Labs).

We love approaching kratom tea from this perspective because it’s how cultures have been conceptualizing tea for thousands of years. After reading this post, if you still have questions, drop it in the comments and we’ll get right back to you!

What is Kratom Tea?

Kratom is an evergreen tree in the coffee family native to Southeast Asia. It’s been used for hundreds of years for energy and to relax after a long day of physical labor.

Traditionally, farmers pick 5 kg of fresh leaves in the morning. The leaves are added to a large pot with water, which is heated to a low boil. The tea is boiled for 4 or 5 hours. After lunch, it’s strained and split between the workers – the perfect end-of-day energy boost.

How to Make Kratom Tea With Crushed Leaf

As you probably know, the Southeast Asian kratom tea tradition never made it to the US. Instead, US consumers use kratom powder – traditional tea replaced with grainy mud-colored sludge. Hmm, delicious.

Enter crushed leaf kratom: step one to improving your tea is switching from kratom powder to crushed leaf. This makes straining possible, which keeps you from having to eat the kratom.

The best way to take kratom, however, is as a tea made from kratom tea bags. With kratom tea bags, you can enjoy all the benefits of a traditional kratom tea with none of the hassle. And if you’re a fan of flavor, you’ll love brewing with flavored kratom tea bags – our favorite way to make kratom tea better.

How To Brew: add 1-3 kratom tea bags, lemon juice, and boiling water into your Travel Tea Thermos. Steep 20 minutes, sweeten (we love using CBD honey sticks), and voilà, enjoy your perfect cup of kratom tea! And you can rebrew the tea bags one more time before getting new ones!

Best Way To Take Kratom

As the millions of US kratom consumers can attest, there are a lot of benefits of kratom. But there’s a catch. When it comes to the benefits of kratom tea, specifically, the most important thing to remember is this:

You have to brew correctly to get the real benefits of kratom tea!

If you skip the essential steps, the alkaloids won’t extract into the water, and you won’t get that energy boost you were looking for. Unless you’re looking for a “micro” serving of mitragynine, there are three steps you need to follow.

In the next section, we’ll review these steps within the context of specific benefits of kratom. Our goal is to highlight why each step is important by showing how it helps you achieve a certain benefit.

Kratom Benefits List

Kratom tea can be judged against two different standards. The first is the quality of the tea itself – which stems from the crushed leaf quality, the tea’s aroma, and the final taste. The other aspect is the kratom tea’s effect—a standard where “better” means more effective.

Our goal is to help you improve in both dimensions—flavor and effect—so you can enjoy the perfect cup of kratom tea, every time. That means delicious, convenient, and effective.

How to Choose a Kratom Strain or Vein

To make a kratom tea for a certain effect, the first thing we recommend focusing on is actually the vein color, not the strain. Some companies use kratom strains in an honest manner, and base their strain names off of alkaloid profiles obtained from lab testing. Other companies, however, use kratom strains arbitrarily as a marketing tactic.

When buying a new vein color or strain from any company, it’s great to read customers’ feedback, because strains may differ between batches and between companies. Nonetheless, you’ll often find people consistently say that white vein kratom gives them energy, while a green vein kratom variety gives them balanced energy with a mild mood boost.

To master delicious and effective kratom tea, it’s essential that you pay attention to these nuances. Once you have a few strains you like, the next step is dialing in your brew process, which brings us to the question of serving size. How much kratom should you use?

How Much Kratom To Take

Once you have a strain, the next consideration is serving size. This is the most important pre-brew step as it will have a huge impact on the effect you get from your kratom tea.

Regardless of the strain, kratom is generally energizing in low servings (1-5 grams) and calming in higher servings (5-10 grams). Because alkaloids research is still in its infancy, we have to rely on personal experience to know exactly how a strain at different servings will affect you.

As you start experimenting, the goal is to find the smallest effective serving size. In addition to being more cost effective, it’s part of following a responsible consumption practice.

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but moderation is necessary. Everyone will settle on the serving size that works for them, and even though the specific amount will vary across consumers, moderation is a key factor in optimizing your kratom tea experience.

 How to Make Kratom Tea

Now that you know which strain(s) you’re going to use, the effect you want, and the serving size you’re starting with, it’s time for the fun part: brewing!

To maximize the whole experience, we suggest viewing tea brewing as a functional art. It’s an ancient tradition that humans have been developing and modifying for thousands of years.

Every culture views and brews tea slightly differently. In Southeast Asia, because kratom is mainly used as a functional beverage by day labors, a tea ceremony never developed.

There were oral traditions shared among friends and between villages, but we don’t have historical source documents to reference when it comes to kratom tea. Despite this, we can study other tea cultures and herbal traditions to find new ways to improve kratom tea.

In practice, this approach has helped us learn three core principles for perfect kratom tea. Each of the following tips is intended to help you brew a strong kratom tea, meaning they address the kratom alkaloid solubility problem. The three essential steps are:

• Maintain a high water temperature for the entire steep time;
• Lower the water’s PH by adding lemon juice;
• Increase steep time to 20+ minutes.

Where to Buy Kratom Tea

There are a few simple rules of thumb when trying to decide where to buy your kratom. First, assuming you already know the strain you want, you want to confirm the vendor’s kratom is lab tested. The goal is clean kratom free of mold, heavy metals, or any foreign materials. 

Next you want to make sure the vendor has crushed leaf kratom, as that makes the best tea. The two big final questions are: is the vendor available for questions, and is their kratom American Kratom Association (AKA) cGMP verified?

As you may have noticed, our recommendations are for buying kratom online. Unless you’re buying from a great local business you can trust, we recommend always buying your kratom online. 

A lot of the kratom that ends up in gas stations or head shops is low quality or untested. Remember, kratom is unregulated in most of the US, so it’s really important you do your due diligence before settling on a kratom vendor. 

Where to Buy Kratom Tea Bags 

When it comes to speciality kratom products, like tea bags, the choice is even simpler: go with Top Tree tea! It’s admittedly self-serving advice, but we have the best kratom tea in the world and we’re not shy about it. What makes us unique? 

We have two categories of kratom tea bags: raw leaf (100% kratom, 3 grams per tea bag) and kratom herbal blends (3 grams of kratom and 2 grams of an herbal tea blend in each tea bag).

We carry a wide range of premium kratom strains, all lab tested for purity, potency, and contamination. Our goal is pioneering the future of kratom by returning to tradition.

Over the past two years we’ve improved every aspect of our tea. Whether it’s tea bag serving size, additional flavors, or brew techniques, everything we recommend is based on data and experience. 

Kratom Tea Brew Guide

Once you’ve mastered simple kratom tea, the next stage in your kratom journey is to start experimenting with ways to improve your brew. The goal of modifying your process is to maximize your kratom tea benefits. Here are a few additional pro-tips to help you be successful:

Pro-Tip #1

Combine multiple strains for a kratom tea blend. This is what most vendors who offer named blends are doing. But with kratom tea bags, you can bring this into the kitchen, and experiment endlessly. In the Top Tree test kitchen, we almost always use 2+ stains for each tea, as it seems to provide a more well-rounded experience in general.

Pro-Tip #2

If you don’t have a tea or coffee thermos, you can brew in a pot over medium to high heat. A lot of kratom guides say can’t use boiling water, but that’s not true. You won’t boil your kratom alkaloids way. That said, for the best kratom tea, the water should be between 180 degrees (a couple bubbles) and 208 degrees (turbulent waters).

Pro-Tip #3

You need to create a more acidic environment if you want to maximize the strength of your tea. We’ll share the data soon, but preliminary data from our kratom tea research shows that you can get up to 50% more alkaloids by adding lemon juice to the water as your tea steeps. That’s a huge difference. If you don’t like lemon juice, you can use lime juice or apple cider vinegar to lower the pH level of your water instead.

Pro-Tip #4

Rebrew your tea bags! To get the most out of each tea bag, we highly recommend resteeping the tea bags a second time. In practice, all this means is that after you pour out your first thermos of tea, simply refill it with hot water and steep for another 20 or 30 minutes. Remember, kratom alkaloids are notoriously difficult to extract into water, so this tip will help you get the best bang for your buck.

Pro-Tip #5

Batch brew your kratom tea! If you don’t have time to brew fresh kratom tea every day, you can brew a large pot of tea, store it in the fridge, and enjoy it over a few days. For a variation of this approach, you can also prepare your kratom tea before bed, so it steeps overnight and is ready for you in the morning. The added benefit of this approach is that your first cup will be especially strong, as you’ve followed one of the principles of perfect tea: increased steep time.

Conclusion

There you have it, a quick review of how to make kratom tea better – a topic that helps outline the main kratom tea benefits. We covered a few of the core principles that determine your tea’s flavor and strength. We also discussed what quality means in kratom tea and why you should always vet a new kratom vendor.

Despite everything we’ve learned over the years, we’re still in the early days of US kratom tea. As more resources are put toward kratom, our ability to improve further will only grow. Until then, however, we have to rely on personal experience and community feedback.

Thankfully, we love kratom tea and sharing ways to improve. To that end, we invite you to join the conversation by sharing your favorite kratom tea tip below. And like always, cheers to better brewing!