Green tea and olive leaf mixed

[olivetealover]

The olive leaf tea brings out a great smoky flavor in the green tea. Anybody else loose leaf mix at home?

[hop_goblin]

The olive leaf tea brings out a great smoky flavor in the green tea. Anybody else loose leaf mix at home?

Are you suggesting people put green leaf in their olive oil or using the leaves of the olive tree to make some type of tea?

[Sam.]

I'm pretty sure he means using the leaves of the olive tree. Olive oil in tea would just be icky.

[Trey Winston]

Like an Asian/Mediterranean fusion... Some things are better just by themselves.

[daughteroftheKing]

I've never thought of drinking olive leaf tea. Then again, I don't live in a climate where olive leaves are in abundance.
Olivetealover - Is this something you came up with up, or it is a popular herbal tea in particular cultures?

[MoGa]

Olivetealover - Is this something you came up with up, or it is a popular herbal tea in particular cultures?

There are a few websites selling and extolling the virtues of olive leaf tea, but it's never been a particularly popular drink in the Mediterranean region. I won't doubt that some peasants will have dried and drunk the leaves, but around France and Spain the common infusions were (and are) Manzanilla and Tila (chamomile and lime leaves). Even during/after the Spanish civil war when food and rations were incredibly scarce, I've not heard of anyone there who would make olive leaf tea.

I'm assuming from olivetealover's handle that s/he's already a convert to olive leaf tea (which is, strictly speaking, not tea but a 'tisane').

Personally, I don't look for a 'smoky' quality in the green tea I drink. I do like some smoky black teas.

olivetealover - if you like tea with a smoky quality to it, perhaps you could try coffee blossom tea. The fragrance is extraordinary, with all the complexity and richness of tobacco (I know the smell of dried olive leaves well... I'm afraid there's just no comparison).
London's postcard teas sell two kinds of tea with coffee blossoms, one blended with a white tea, another with a black Sri Lankan tea.
scroll to bottom here: http://www.postcardteas.com/tealist.htm

I'll look out for olive leaf tisane and give it a try. I'm afraid it would have to be exceptional for me to want to brave mixing it with a perfectly decent sencha though.

Have you tried mixing olive leaves with other teas traditionally more amenable to a smoky taste?

-----

Alternatively, if you mixed in olive leaves because the taste of green tea is too fresh or grassy for you I can earnestly recommend Nokcha from "Middle of a Dream Mountain", Bosong, Korea
http://www.eastteas.com/teas.html
It's quite unlike any other green tea I've ever tasted.
I have a packet in front of me which perfectly describes the tea:
has "a natural toasty sweetness and an earthy, biscuity fragrance. Smooth and satisfying, nokcha is grown entirely without any chemicals".
Biscuity is definitely the right word for this tea!

[TaiPing Hou Kui]

Tea is such an interesting thing. Some people will say "dont mix things with it"....keep the tea pure, others will want to mix things with it......I still dont know how I feel about it. I am a purist and absolutley hate flavored tea, tea with added things to flavor it, but, who am I to tell somebody else what they"Should" like? Personally I have never mixed loose tea at home, but I say, if you like it, then go for it! Obviously there are many plants/hers/etc. on this planet that are excellent for you, so, I dont see anything wrong with it, it just isnt my style or taste....but I would be quite interested to hear what you and others think of this olive leaf tea!

-Nick (TaiPing)

[gaia]

Ehm.. I'm from Italy and I can assure that nobody here would have an olive leaf tea! Have you ever tasted an olive leaf?? It's INCREDIBLY bitter and in my opinion its flavour doesn't match with tea. But de gustibus non disputandum est..

[MoGa]

Ehm.. I'm from Italy and I can assure that nobody here would have an olive leaf tea! Have you ever tasted an olive leaf?? It's INCREDIBLY bitter and in my opinion its flavour doesn't match with tea. But de gustibus non disputandum est..

Hi gaia!

I knew for certain that no-one is Spain drinks this stuff (except I have to be careful when saying 'nobody' - I'd like to think nobody drinks their own urine... but obviously some people do) and guessed that there is no tradition of drinking olive leaf 'tea' in Italy, thanks for confirming this. I was in Spain's Valencia region this weekend and saw many tisanes for sale, none were from olive leaves.

It's strange that websites like olea.com.au state
"Two thousand years later, people of the Mediterranean are still drinking olive leaf tea and taking olive leaf extract. If you ask them why, they will tell you with determined faces that it keeps them healthy and that it has kept their families in good health for generations."

I'd like to know who these "people of the Mediterranean" are. Urinotherapy enthusiasts will also tell you with determined faces that it keeps them healthy.

I don't mean to be rude to olivetealover, but all the websites I've seen that describe olive leaf tea give a lot of very suspect information. If anyone can steer me to an alternative source of information I'd be grateful. From what I can work out, people have only been drinking this for pleasure since 1996, and there's nothing wrong with that at all (I'm still keen to try it), but this probably doesn't sound very good from a marketing standpoint so all this guff is made up about it being a traditional beverage. I'd be very interested to learn about who exactly was drinking this before the 1990s.