Over the last few years I’ve developed quite a liking for herbal teas. It all started when I began having a few health problems and was advised to cut down on caffeine, and for some reason didn’t even consider ordinary black tea which had been decaffeinated. Instead, I picked up a few interesting looking packets of herbal teas and began trying them.

Herbal tea .. what exactly does that mean? Either it’s tea or it isn’t tea, and surely tea is made from leaves of the camellia sinensis plant? If it isn’t, then it must be a herbal infusion, or tisane. Call me pedantic, but I think we need to be clear here.

Anyway, I picked up a few packets of herbal infusions and rather liked them. I took them into work with me and made tea - um, infused them - in my morning break which was probably a mistake since at that point I was working as a non-teaching classroom assistant in a local secondary school and a combination of warm and stuffy classroom, inactivity, the soothing but uninteresting monologue from the teacher and my as-yet-undiagnosed thyroid dysfunction meant that the caffeine would have been useful in keeping me awake.

There was a another problem, however. I began to notice that on returning to the classroom for the second half of the morning, I would be very thirsty. This was disconcerting because I’d just drunk a large mug of Definitely Not Tea but nevertheless warm liquid, and I began to wonder if the tiredness was more than just cutting out caffeine and maybe was a symptom of diabetes - but no. Tests quickly ruled that one out.

So what was it? Why did I suffer from an uncomfortably dry mouth and throat at this time of day? Well, the obvious change in my routine was my switch to herbal t- … um, infusions. I read the label. The only ingredient in those teabags with which my system was not familiar was hibiscus, so on my next trip to the supermarket I searched to herbal t-infusions without hibiscus. You know what? Unless I wanted plain nettle tea (which makes you pee) or chamomile (which is soporific if the label is to be believed) I didn’t have much choice! That damned hibiscus was in pretty much all of the rest - and what’s more, as the main ingredient! Eventually I found one made simply of lemon and ginger which was pleasant and had no adverse effect and I began to drink that instead with the result that people kept asking me if I had a cold coming, but hey! At least I no longer had a horribly dry mouth.

These days there is more choice on the supermarket shelves for non-tea teas, if I might be forgiven for that clumsy phrase, and people like Twinings have jumped on the bandwagon and are producing all kinds of interesting mixtures. My favourites keep disappearing though - Tetley make a range in little round cardboard tubs each containing 20 individual ‘tea’ bags. I used to buy the Ginger and Mint one quite regularly, and also the Tangerine and Lemon (strictly speaking a fruit infusion). Both very nice and neither one of them containing anything other than the suggested ingredients or something equally innocuous. Both of them have since disappeared from my local supermarket shelves in favour of other varieties of carboard-tubbed Tetley herbal tea-like infusions all containing .. you guessed it … hibiscus! Thankfully, it is possible to go to the Tetley website and order their products direct, though I am disappointed to see that I still can’t buy them in larger pack sizes than a miserable twenty bags.

And I have also discovered Redbush ‘tea’ which is rather nice, caffeine-free and contains no bloody hibiscus whatsoever.