How To Make Cedar Tea

By: Cambium Indigenous Professional Services Date: December 9, 2021

Cedar has been used for centuries by the Indigenous People of North America as a sacred medicine. Due to it's healing properties, Cedar has been used for decades as an antiseptic, anti fungal, antiviral, air purifier and all round immune boosting compound.

Cedar is truly a wonderful healing compound that when used on a consistent basis can help with the following health conditions.

-Respiratory;

-Skin;

-Immune deficiency;

-Sickness/colds;

Cedar tea is particularly effective. Below is a transcription of the video (below) and will outline how I make cedar tea.

--Video Transcription Below--

Step 1: Clean the cedar leaves

The first step to making cedar tea is to make sure that we get some of the dirt, that has accumulated off the cedar leaves. What we are going to do is put them (cedar leaves) into a plastic bag (like this) and we are going to give the bag a few shakes to get rid of the dirt that has accumulated on the cedar leaves.

Once we do this we will take the cedar leaves out of the plastic bag and lay them down on out cutting board to prepare them for step 2. The dirt from the cedar leaves will remain in the plastic bag and we have cedar leaves that are ready to be prepped for step 2.

How to make cedar tea step 1: Clean cedar leaves

Step 2: Chop your cedar leaves

The next step (to make our cedar tea) is to chop the cedar leaves into smaller chunks so that when we do boil the tea (the leaves) it will be a little easier to make the cedar tea. You

don't want to have (the cedar leaves) too fine, you want to slice through them with a knife so that the cedar leaves are in smaller bits.

Related: How Maple Syrup is Made

This will make it a little easier to boil when you make your cedar tea. We are going to make one cup of cedar tea so we need (roughly) one cup of packed cedar leaves. Add the cedar leaves to a measuring cup and pack it down a bit.

You should get one cup of packed cedar leaves. Exactly what we need for our cedar tea.

Let's move onto the next step which is to make the actual cedar tea.

How to make cedar tea step 2: Chop cedar leaves

Step 3: Measure water and add cedar to a pot

The next step is to get the water and cedar leaves ready to boil on the stove. What we are going to do is measure out 2 1/2 cups of water and add that to a pot. Add the cedar leaves to the pot and it is ready to boil.

You have to remember that when the water starts to boil, water evaporates as it boils so roughly 2 1/2 cups (of water) will boil down to just over a cup of tea, give or take depending on how hot the stove gets and how much water evaporates. 2 1/2 cups of water and 1 cup of packed cedar leaves should yield 1 cup of cedar tea.

Let's move onto the next step which is to boil the water and leaves.