eli5: what makes tea, tea? like what’s different than me plucking leaves off a random tree or finding dry ones off the ground and essentially making flavoured water?
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Noting is different about it. Tea is any beverage made by steeping leaves in hot water. Black tea, oolong tea, and green tea all use leaves from the same plant – but “herbal tea” covers a wide range of plants. Flowers (like Chamomile,) herbs (like mint,) even weeds (you can buy dandelion tea!)
There isn’t! “Tea” as most people think of it comes from 1 specific plant, but there are all sorts of herbal teas that are just exactly that, flowers and leaves picked off of plants and put in hot water.
Nothing. You can make tea out of anything. That’s what herbal teas are. *Tea* tea is specifically made with leaves from the plant species Camellia sinensis, but you can make tea by steeping the leaves of any kind of plant in water.
Tea are the leaves of one specific plant, Camellia sinensis.
Strictly speaking, if you poured boiling water over the dried leaves of any other plant, what you would have is an “infusion,” not tea, although such concoctions are often called “teas,” e.g. chamomile tea. You could certainly try it with any old leaf off the ground, but it’s unlikely to taste very good.
Tea is a beverage made by brewing leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant (and possibly additional ingredients).
Herbal infusions, often (somewhat incorrectly) called herbal teas, are made from other plants and herbs and do not contain the Camellia sinensis leaves.
In addition to being from a specific plant, actual-tea is processed differently to make different kinds of product.
If you just take the whole leaves and try them, you get white tea which has a very delicate (some might say almost nonexistent) flavour.
Most of the interesting-flavoured compounds in tea are produced by oxidising and/or fermenting the leaves before drying them.
If you just oxidise them a little bit (by mildly bruising them and allowing them to sit a while before drying), you get green tea – the leaves are still green, but you get a greeny-yellow liquid from steeping them in water, with a mild flavour.
If you chop them up and leave them to sit longer before drying, the air and the enzymes really get to work transforming the chemical composition of the leaf juices, and you get black tea – producing a red-brown liquid with a lot more astringent tannins and a deeper flavour.
ETA: also the type (eg young leaves from the tips vs older leaves) and the exact variety, growing conditions, etc all go into the differences between different teas.
Plus some are heat treated, some are cultured with fungus, etc. etc. it’s as intricate as winemaking and cheesemaking, seriously.
Real tea comes from the leaves of the tea plant (it’s seriously referred to as the tea plant). If you put random leaves and whatever else in hot water it would be ‘herbal tea’.
If you try to pick leaves of a random plant and make tea or if it. Can you please let us know how it turns out for you
There is no difference. What you refer to as Tea is Just an optimized version for more flavour. But what you described is also tea.
What the other comments didn’t mention is that actual tea normally contains caffeine (same as coffee) and for this reason has a (mild) stimulating effect. The extent of this effect depends on how strong you make your tea. Herbal infusions from some other random leaves are unlikely to contain any caffeine.
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