The gift of GABA

Can a tea filled with neurotransmitters quiet the mind?

A soothing broth

The tea: GABA oolong, sold by BANGtea. $26 for 50g.

Gamma-aminobutyric acid—GABA to its friends—is a neurotransmitter that slows down activity in the brain, and has been used in supplement form to treat anxiety, sleeplessness, and high blood pressure. Our bodies produce our own GABA and it’s present in foods such as tomatoes and kimchi. In 1984, a team of researchers in Japan found a way to cultivate GABA in tea leaves by processing them in an oxygen-free vacuum chamber. GABA teas are now made in Japan, Taiwan, and other tea regions in Asia, where they’re often considered natural remedies to soothe the body and quiet the mind. So do they live up to the marketing hype?

As with so much in tea, it depends on what you want to get out of the experience. What I can say is that I thoroughly enjoy this GABA oolong from BANGtea for its brassy, brothy flavor and a peaceful warmth I feel in my body while drinking. Black, green, and oolong teas can all be made with GABA processing, but regardless of style, the brews tend to share cozy notes of sweet potato and ripe summer tomatoes. BANG’s GABA oolong excels on this front. I’d drink it even if I didn’t feel a thing.

The source: Tech worker and radio DJ Sam Tilney fell into tea when living in Taiwan for a few months in 2008. She kept coming back to the island to drink tea and visit friends, then started BANGtea in 2018 to source and sell her own. BANG specializes in clean-tasting Taiwanese oolongs that are approachable and easy to love, yet complex and layered. “Bang” is programmer talk for the exclamation mark; Tilney says she wanted to “shake everyone out of this super rigid mindset that tea requires ceremony, silence, etc. It's not my style and not how I learned to drink tea.” I like it when you can taste the personal preferences in a seller’s selections, and the teas I’ve tried from BANG capture that energy well.

To brew: When brewing this tea in a small pot or gaiwan, the GABA verve hits in greater and greater waves, like floating in a lagoon during the rising tide. I use 6 grams in an 80 milliliter gaiwan (~1g/13ml) with short steeps of just a few seconds, lengthening as I go. The aroma is abundant potent and the brew feels thick and almost starchy in the mouth, like vegetable broth. If you’ve ever sampled pure MSG crystals, you’ll recognize a similar effect on the tongue. After a couple cups, I feel a radiant warmth along my neck, arms, and hands, and the brassy sweetness rings around the sides of my mouth. This would be a good tea to brew for meditation purposes. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce.

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Notes of neurotransmitters: a deeper look at GABA tea

The thing about living with chronic anxiety is that, for me, there’s almost always this sunken pit in my chest telling me something’s wrong. Therapy helps. Medication helps. A nourishing diet and plenty of sunlight come recommended. But once you unpack the treacherous notion that maybe not everything is your fault, you start to wonder what about the construction of the world makes you feel this way. The material conditions for human life have never been better—imagine Louis XIV’s reaction to the idea of a hot shower in every home—yet the atomized, bureaucratized, and capitalized engine of global society has found so many ways to make us feel worse. Ads for “natural” “plant-based” “healing remedies” like GABA seem like the disease hawking novel symptoms as the cure.

Now that you know where I’m coming from, let’s talk about GABA.

Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that send signals to neurons in our brain. In simplified terms, GABA’s primary message is to slow things down. It temporarily makes it harder for neurons to send or receive signals, reducing the nervous system’s overall stimulation. GABA works in tandem with other neurotransmitters like serotonin to regulate mood, digestion, sleep, and other essential functions. One of the ways that benzodiazepines like Xanax work to calm someone down is by enhancing their sensitivity to GABA. Writing for the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, the researcher Phyllis Bronson explains, “Biochemically, the root of anxiety is an overfiring of nerves, leading to a feeling of being overwhelmed. Often, when the receptors for the central nervous system are filled with GABA, this overfiring stops and anxiety can be assuaged.”