Herbal Teas for Focus & Concentration

Brahmi is named for Brahma, the creator. Ayurvedic texts put the plant among the medhya rasayana, the herbs of the mind, and by one account its earliest mention sits in a Vedic text of about 800 BC. The story goes that students learning the long hymns by heart took it while they worked. English calls it herb of grace, which in Florida is simply the name of the wild plant.

Brahmi is also the name of a second, unrelated plant. Gotu kola, Centella asiatica, carries it too, and one tin on this shelf holds both. Across South and Southeast Asia gotu kola is a green before it is anything else: a cold drink in Vietnam and Thailand, a peanut salad in Myanmar, fritters in Bengal. It is not a kola nut and has no caffeine in it. In May 1933 Time printed the advice of the herbalist Li Ching-Yuen, whose reported age nobody could check: keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog.

The caffeine here comes from two other plants. Pu-erh is Yunnan leaf, pressed into cakes, nests and bricks and left to age, so a three-year vintage is a tea with a date on it. Yerba mate is a holly, a cousin of the Christmas one, and mate is Quechua for the gourd it is drunk from.

Buddha’s Zen Blend is the tin with both brahmis in it, over rooibos and green tea with ginseng root. The Hangover, Organic is where the mate is, under Ceylon green tea. Pu-erh, Three-Year Vintage, Organic is the plain aged leaf, and Scottish Caramel, Pu-erh, Three-Year Vintage, is the same leaf with almond. Spearmint and Ayurvedic Pitta Balance, Organic have no caffeine in them at all, the second one hibiscus, peppermint, lemongrass and rose petals.