Our Reishi Mushroom Chai Tea is a Warm and Tasty Beverage

A tasty beverage that can help the stress of the day melt away.

Mushroom chai tea is not only a warming health tonic, but it’s also deliciously easy to drink. Chai tea spices blend beautifully with the earthy bitterness of woody mushrooms to create this Reishi Mushroom Chai Tea. On its own, reishi mushrooms are medicinal and not so easy to swallow. However, when married with the sensory explosion found in chai tea, sipping on ‘shrooms is effortless. 

Reishi Mushrooms Are Healing Superfoods

For centuries, reishi mushrooms have been used in health tonics as adaptogenic herbs. Adaptogens help balance, restore, and protect the body. Eastern medicine has been using reishi mushrooms for centuries, but they’re just recently appearing on the Western radar.

Drinking reishi mushrooom chai tea, then, is good for addressing the following:

• Cancer treatment and cancer survivors
• Depression and anxiety
• Autoimmune conditions
• Heart disease
• Improved liver function
• Enhanced blood sugar control

Making Mushroom Chai Tea 

The hardest part in making this health tonic is knowing where to find the ingredients. If you don’t have the advantage of being near an Asian market, then your next best bet is Walmart. Otherwise, you can look to online retailers to procure these ingredients.

Finding ingredients for chai tea, on the other hand, is very simple. Chai tea is a combination of warm and spicy ingredients, including cardamom, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon. You may go the easy route by purchasing chai tea in a concentrated or bagged tea format. However, if you wish to brew your own chai tea, try our Slow Cooker Chai Tea or Chai Orange Latte. Want it cold? Go with Skinny Iced Chai Latte.

Traditionally, chai tea includes some form of milk, but my favorite alternative is soy milk. The texture provided by soy milk integrates with the other ingredients more easily than cow’s milk. That’s not to say regular whole milk won’t work because it’s also very delicious. If you’re looking for alternative milks to make dairy-free mushroom chai tea, soy is much less watered down than the others. 

First, Decoct the Reishi Mushrooms

Because the process of decoction takes up to two hours, go ahead and make it ahead of time. Dried reishi is dense like a piece of wood. Rehydrating these mushrooms takes longer than, say, a dried shiitake mushroom.

To make it happen, bring four cups of water to a boil. Add the mushrooms and simmer on the lowest setting for one to two hours. Surprisingly, you only lose about a cup of water in this process, so don’t worry about final yield. 

After that, wait for the mixture to cool to room temp. Then, place the mushrooms in a cheesecloth and squeeze as much water from them as possible. If you don’t have cheesecloth, try squeezing them through a fine-mesh strainer.

Next, brew the chai tea by adding one cup of the hot mushroom liquid to the bagged tea (or by pouring it over the loose tea in a strainer). If you have a milk frother, a bit of steamed milk goes a long way. So does your sweetener of choice. To your health and happiness!

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