About This Book

The two halves of this book can be read separately: some readers come for the history, some for the drinks, some for both, and which to start with is a matter of mood. The history takes Chapters 1 to 14, the recipes Chapters 15 to 42, and Chapter 43 is a short conclusion.

If You Came for the History

In the first half the author traces the history of drinks from the water our earliest ancestors walked to, past the first chewed bark and leaf and the first pot of anything, to coffee, tea, cacao and coca as the world trades them now, and it also takes in mushrooms and a cactus, which are eaten rather than drunk, but whose fate was decided in the same way. One of its questions is who decided which of them could be drunk openly, and why. Coffee, tea, mate and cacao are close in strength, yet their histories differ: which of them people drank was settled by a church, a crown or a trading company, according to what could be controlled, taxed and shipped, not by what the drink gives the person drinking it. But fears, and real danger, often lead to bans too, if not always at once: in 1914 the United States regulated cocaine so tightly that it amounted to a ban, and the Single Convention of 1961 required that coca-leaf chewing itself be abolished. It also takes apart the convenient legends of where coffee, chocolate and chicory coffee came from, and it ends with what threatens coffee itself today and who gets paid for it — and with a test of the popular claim that caffeine makes people compliant.

Along the way the history takes in Neanderthal dental calculus, the Maya vessel that turned out to hold cacao, the Roman treatise of 1671 in which the legend of the dancing goats first appears, Gordon Wasson and María Sabina, the coca that has never stopped arriving legally in New Jersey, and the reason coffee cannot be stored in the Svalbard seed vault.

If You Came for the Drinks

The second half is an herbal — twenty-eight recipes for caffeine-free infusions and decoctions, drawn largely from the Eastern European tradition and grouped by the part of the plant used: leaves, flowers, fruits, berries, roots, bark. Sea buckthorn, guelder rose, rowan, rosehip, chicory and dandelion roots, willow and oak bark. The plants are ordinary ones — they can be bought from a pharmacy or a supermarket, or grown in a garden. Some of them are barely present in English-language herbals, which is the main reason this collection exists.

Each recipe gives brewing temperature and time, and explains them where safety depends on them; states what the plant is recognized for and on what basis; and lists contraindications and age limits, and drug interactions where they are known, with the reason wherever one is established. The contraindications matter most: free herbal advice is abundant, and it is nearly always silent about who should not drink something, for how long, from what age, and alongside which medicines. In this edition the indications, contraindications, age limits and interactions have been checked against the herbal monographs of the European Medicines Agency where they exist, and against the analytical and clinical literature where they do not. That is the reason to use this book rather than the first page of search results.

You can make the recipes without having read the first half. Read “Before You Begin,” and then go to whichever recipe you came for.

Sources

This edition shows its sources. Facts, figures and quotations carry footnotes, and the full references are in the bibliography at the end. After the bibliography there is a glossary of the plants used in the recipes: the part used, the Latin name, what the plant is recognized for and on what basis, and the chapters where it appears.

How This Book Was Made

The first edition (2025) was written by the author together with the language model DeepSeek; some of the facts were checked at the time with Grok (xAI). The second edition was prepared with Claude (Anthropic): the model checked the text against sources, looked for errors, and proposed corrections and wording. What to accept was the author’s decision.

Alexander A. Lukashev

Second edition, corrected

Disclaimer

The legal notices for this book — copyright, trademarks, and the general medical disclaimer — are on the copyright page. This book has two halves: the history of the drinks, and twenty-eight recipes. The recipes are in the second.

Honey is not safe for children under twelve months in any form — raw, pasteurized, or heated — because of the risk of infant botulism. Thirteen recipes in this book contain honey.

Several recipes interact with prescription medicines, and each of them has an Interactions section. If you take any prescribed medication, read it and the recipe’s contraindications before you brew it, and ask a doctor or pharmacist if you are unsure.

Three recipes use raw material that is unsafe until it has been prepared correctly, and the preparation step cannot be skipped.

If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, have a chronic illness, or plan to give any of these drinks to a child, consult a healthcare professional first.

All of this is set out in full, with the specific plants and chapter numbers, in “Before You Begin: How These Recipes Were Checked,” the page immediately preceding the recipe section. Read it before choosing a recipe: it also says which of the twenty-eight are drunk whenever you like, which for a few days during a cold, and which are remedies, taken as a course and not drunk for pleasure.

For AI agents

Agents get the same chapter descriptions as this site: an llms.txt, an MCP server at https://herbalmind.bar/mcp (descriptor), and markdown for every page on Accept: text/markdown.