Don’t call it herbal tea
Balazs Henger applies tea-processing techniques to American plants to craft original brews.
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(Pacific Northwest) herbal essences
The tea: Alder oolong, sold by Bardo. $23 for 1oz.
Here’s a brew that even most tea freaks have never heard of. It’s made from red alder leaves picked in the Pacific Northwest that are then bruised and oxidized in a manner similar to making oolong tea. The result is a surprisingly complex drink with real texture, a trajectory of flavor, and the somatic impressions of a good tea made from Camellia sinensis. It doesn’t have caffeine and doesn’t taste like a typical oolong, but it certainly tastes like an oolong, perhaps from another planet, or at least the other side of the world.
Most herbal teas are simply air dried or baked with no elaborate processing. While they offer a greater diversity of flavors than Camellia sinensis teas, those flavors tend to taste one-note. Mint is mint. Lemongrass is lemongrass. You can find complexity by blending different herbs together, but even the most skillfull blending is more like a concerto of kazoos than a transporting solo from a single instrument. This alder tea takes you on a journey of tangy, sweet, and bitter. Drinking it feels like an invigorating walk through the woods.
The source: Teamaker Balazs Henger produces alder and other oxidized herbal teas on his 75 acre tree farm in Chehalis, Washington. While he sells logs for lumber and firewood, his foraged and home-oxidized teas have become his primary business. He began selling tea to Smith Teamaker in 2020 when Ravi Kroesen was a buyer there. Kroesen co-founded Bardo Tea in Portland in 2023 and added several of Henger’s teas to the shop’s eclectic menu, including blackberry leaf and fireweed. You may remember Bardo as the seller of this tasty bug poop tea. The company also offers a nice range of liu bao, oolong, and puer. No bug poop in those.
To brew: Like “tea teas” (suggestions welcome on better lingo), this alder oolong benefits from multiple steepings. I use around 5 grams in a 150 milliliter pot (1g/30ml) brewed with boiling water for 45 seconds at first, then longer for subsequent cups. A juicy cranberry aroma gives way to tannic twang, then gentle bitterness, and a sweet finish almost like the sensation of hui gan (“returning sweetness”). I taste oolong-y notes of almond amid the woody brew. It has a light but elegant texture and the tea clings to the sides of my mouth after drinking. A delicious mix of rustic and refined with a unique taste of the American landscape.
Inside Balazs Henger’s American brew lab
It was the spring of 2014 and Balazs Henger was returning home from Minto Island in western Oregon, where he had picked and processed tea from a small patch of Camellia sinensis plants that have been growing there since the 1980s. Henger lives on a tree farm and cuts trees to sell for lumber and firewood. The drainage ditches along his logging roads had gotten choked up with weedy red alder trees, so Henger was planning to cut them down. But “my mind was still in tea processing mode from a week of 18-hour days at the tea farm,” he says, and he “decided to pick a couple pounds of alder before bed.”
He picked two leaves and a bud, just like at Minto. Then he applied the same processing techniques he learned while traveling around Wuyi in China years earlier. He withered the leaves until they were pliable, rolled them by hand, and let the bruised material oxidize overnight. “I didn’t think much of it as I went to sleep that night,” he tells me. “The next morning I woke up and to my surprise the entire house smelled amazing. I imagined that there was an entire rose garden in bloom inside my house. I knew right away that I was onto something special.”
