Green Tea Extracts

You probably shouldn't take them. For several reasons.

1) The tea used in green tea extracts is of the lowest quality. Yes, you'll get considerable amounts of antioxidants, and yes, the taste doesn't matter when you're swallowing a pill. But the lowest quality tea also has the highest level of toxins, such as fluoride, aluminum, and whatever else the soil has been exposed to.

2) Taking a pill every morning isn't as effective as drinking several cups of tea over the course of the day. Most of the antioxidants in tea get flushed out of your system, so drinking 6 cups of tea over the course of 12 hours will keep more antioxidants in your system for a longer time than taking one pill with the equivalent of 6 cups of tea once a day.

3) Too much of a good thing is bad. Your kidneys and liver filter the polyphenols in tea out of your bloodstream. I could explain why your body does this, but that would take research I don't feel like doing right now, so I'll post on it later. Anyway, there's an upper limit to how much of these antioxidants are good for you. Some green tea extracts are equivalent to ten, twenty, forty, fifty, or more cups of tea, and that is not good.

Check it out.

It's partly our culture that decrees if something is good, then more of it must be better. I haven't found any studies that have shown liver or kidney damage can be caused by drinking tea alone, so it may just be that the supplements do this by introducing too many polyphenols into the body at one time, but then I doubt there is anyone who's ever drank 50 cups of green tea a day on a regular basis.

I've found several websites that sell these supplements, and they tend to say things along the line of, "there's no such thing as 'too much' when it comes to green tea." If you see one of these ridiculous bullshit claims, just remember that they are trying to sell you a product, not make you live longer.

Ditch the supplements and just drink tea. Or if you're savvy with herbal rememedies and like the convenience of supplements, make your own extracts! Just boil the tea in a pot like you normally would, remove the tea leaves and let the tea sit on low heat for several hours, and wait for all the water to evaporate off. The powdery residue on the bottom of the pot is your extract. Just remember how much tea you put into the pot in the first place so you don't accidentally megadose on green tea extract and make yourself sick.

Honesty and Morocco

It may seem like I enjoy ALL teas on this site. After all, I haven't posted a bad review or anything... Not true. I don't like green tea. I dislike the vegetal, grassy taste and the bitterness that ensues if my timer doesn't go off while I'm steeping it (which it always does—it's a passive-aggressive timer that only alerts me when I'm brewing something that can be oversteeped like rooibos or white tea).

However, I DO love Moroccan Mint green tea, which is named so apparently because Moroccans like green tea with mint (as if no one else does). In fact, this was the first tea I ever truly enjoyed without having to put a ton of sugar into it. Honest Tea, in fact, way back in 2002 before they were bought by Coca-Cola. It's great tea and so far is the only brand I've found that sells actual tea, not sugar water with tea in it (although their new offerings keep getting sweeter and sweeter). On an unrelated note, I really miss their Kashmiri Chai. It was about the only chai tea I liked cold. And boy, was it good... Anyway, I still love their Moroccan Mint tea, although the formula has changed several times since I first drank it. They've switched between cane juice and honey as sweetener, China green tea and gunpowder green tea, and proportions. It's a bit fuller flavored these days, which is fine.

But it costs $6.00 for half a gallon, and in summer I will drink that half-gallon in a day or two. So for a few years now I've been trying to replicate their formula. It doesn't help that they keep changing it, but I've found one that works pretty well. The directions below are for a gallon batch, so adjust according to your needs. You should probably have a very large infuser for this. The dry material shouldn't take up more than half the space in it or your tea will suffer.

My ingredients are:

1 gallon of distilled water (I never actually use distilled water, but I bet if I did it'd be awesome)
6 heaping tablespoons of green tea (actual tablespoons, not the official measure)
4 tsp. peppermint leaf
2 tsp. spearmint leaf
3/4 tsp. lemon juice
6 tbsp. (the official measure, not actual tablespoons) honey


I usually do two infusions for a total of two gallons of tea: one for 3 minutes, and the second for 5 or more. You don't want boiling water, as this is green tea, and the second batch WILL be much lighter than the first, so halve your lemon juice for that one or it'll be more citrusy than minty or green tea-y.

I usually use Dragonwell green tea, but I've gotten good results with Sencha and Gyokuro as well. Stay away from the gunpowder green tea. It is inferior. My last batch used Adagio's Emerald Needle green tea—the tea smells divine and tastes pretty good on its own for a green tea. With the mint it tastes a bit fruity. Maybe too much so.

Also, try substituting lime juice for lemon juice. It tastes less like the Honest Tea version I've tried to copy, but it's very good. You can also just use citric acid if you want, but you'll need such a small amount and every time I try I invariably fuck it up and make the tea way too acidic.

Anyway, once you have it steeped, it should keep in your fridge for a couple weeks at least. I've never had a batch go bad on me within that time frame (or ever, actually, because they don't typically last past that timeframe).


I don't actually like this version hot very much. I prefer straight peppermint leaf with my green tea when I have hot Moroccan Mint. But you can drink it however you please.