Thyme Tea: Why is it so good?

I recently purchased this Thyme Tea on clearance. It’s made in Bosnia. I didn’t expect to like it, but it’s actually nice. Floral notes, with an almost mint finish. Doesn’t make sense to me. Why?


Can you show how the tea looks like? On the package, it’s just 100% thyme.

Did you compare to the dried thyme for spice, is it the same?

I’ll do that tonight. It’s just a tea bag with dried thyme. It comes out with a greenish hue.

I made my own tea using dried thyme I purchased from Trader Joe’s and using thyme from our garden. Neither was pleasant for me. This commercial tea must be a specific variety or grown in a particular way.

Here are pics of the tea bag and the brewed end result.


No idea what makes it so good. In Albania and northern Greece I saw dried wild herbs at markets. I stayed the night in Theth (northern Albania) with an Albanian family and one of the things she made was boiled wild herb tea. Simply boil a bunch of dried herb in a big pot and drink it pure. Very aromatic, a lot better than yerba mate I had in Argentina which I thought tasted like floor sweepings, twigs and dirt.

Along the (mountain) paths in the countryside in Albania I did see endless shrubs and patches of wild thyme.

I can identify only the sage. Right next to it, lower right, is probably thyme.

What beautiful photos!

I wonder if it could be the variety of the thyme that made a difference?
Or the age of the herb?

I subscribe to an herb CSA and have been making/learning about herbal teas and found that different varieties can taste quite different. Brewing methods can change the taste too (cold brew, short brew time, overnight infusions).

Have you tried making tea from fresh thyme? I’ve purchased herb plants from the local Whole Foods (often on sale for $1.50 a plant) and keep them on my window sill, sometimes I just snip some of the herbs and make some tea from them. Tends to give a milder tea flavor than dried.

There used to be these advertisements on TV here in the US about the “most interesting man in the world”. Presunto reminds me of those.

My first guess was the variety. Yes, I have “English” and “French” thyme growing in the garden. I tried brewing both those varieties and also dried thyme I purchased from Trader Joe’s. To be fair, the TJ’s thyme was never great quality to being with.

Thanks to both. Hope you can find the anwser someday, Bmorecupcake.

I noticed the herbs in Albania and Greece were very aromatic. A lot more so than the stuff we get at home.

According to the ingredients list, the thyme in question isn’t merely a particular “strain” or “cultivar” of the thyme used as a seasoning herb (that’s Thymus vulgaris), it’s a distinct species (Thymus serpyllum) and I imagine that while it shares some of the same chemical constituents with T. vulgaris, its overall phytochemical makeup is probably quite different. I didn’t know anything about the latter until I Googled it (so I won’t bother to just repeat what I found), but while it’s apparently quite common in the wild, and frequently used as a tea/medicinal herb, it’s not widely used in cooking, so its flavor wouldn’t be familiar or comparable to the different strains of “cooking thyme”. (The different ones like lemon thyme, English/French/German thyme, etc are all strains or cultivars of T. vulgaris.)

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Thank you for your investigative work!

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Minor correction. After various edits, I see my post ended up with a misplaced “latter” reference. What I meant to say was that I didn’t know anything about Thymus serpyllum (aka “creeping thyme”) until this thread’s OP made me curious and I Googled it…