560% more essential oil in home-grown chamomile tea

German Chamomile produces the sweetest smell and a delicious cup of tea. It is a favourite soothing and cooling herb crucial to every herbal garden apothecary. 

The essential oil in chamomile is what gives it its unique aroma and taste. When you make a cup of tea, it is the essential oils you can smell after you pour hot or boiling water over the flowers. This is why we always recommend covering your cup with a lid as you wait for it to brew so that you can capture the delicate oils as they evaporate, ensuring that you get the tastiest and most beneficial cuppa.

If you already grow your own, you may have wondered why a cup of chamomile tea made from home-grown plants often tastes so much better than tea bags bought from the shop. This is something we have been curious to investigate, so we decided to do some tests to find out how the essential oil content of herbs compares with herbs bought from the shops. We sent some freshly dried chamomile flowers a specialist lab for analysis and the results exceeded our expectations!

Our German chamomile was found to have an essential oil content of 13.2ml/kg (or 1.3%). To put this in perspective, we can compare the result against the quality standards commonly used in the herbal world. The European Herbal Infusion Association standard, which is used by many herbal tea companies as a guideline for determining the minimum essential oil content in their herbs, specifies a minimum of 2ml/kg (or 0.2%) for German chamomile. Compared with this standard, the essential oil content from our home-grown chamomile flowers is a staggering 560% higher!

When chamomile is sold as a herbal medicinal product or as high-grade herbal tea, a herbal company may choose, or be legally required, to adhere to the more stringent standards of the British Pharmacopoeia. The latest pharmacopoeia monograph specifies a minimum of 4ml/kg (or 0.4%) essential oil content for German chamomile. So, even when we compare our home-grown chamomile flowers against ‘medicinal grade’ standards, it is still 230% higher.

So, in summary, it’s not surprising home-grown chamomile often tastes so much better! And if you’re seeking the calming effects of a bedtime cup of chamomile tea, the higher essential oil content will enhance its therapeutic benefits too.

It’s worth mentioning that we have only done one round of tests so far, and we don’t know to what extent the result may vary from year to year. We will keep testing and keep you posted. And if you’re interested in learning more food grade vs pharmacopoeia grade herbs, and seeing some of our other essential results, we have explored this in a bit more detail in another blog post: Is Home-Grown Always Better? Exploring Herbal Quality and Standards.

Why is the essential oil content so much higher?

There are a number of possible factors that affect essential oil content, including soil type, climate, time of harvest, duration between harvest and drying, the method and temperature of drying, and subsequent storage. Aromatic herbs, especially delicate flowers, are particularly sensitive to the drying process, and it is likely that our dryer in the seed shed, which uses dehumidified air at a low temperature, will have made a significant impact, as would the 30 second walk from the field to the dryer!

In contrast, much of the commercially available chamomile used by herbal tea companies will have been harvested on a large scale in Egypt or the east of Europe, been transported on trucks and ships, passed through multiple warehouses, various cleaning and cutting processes followed by packaging into smaller bags, teabags or supplements and storage before ending up in your kitchen or herbal apothecary. Even when handled with the greatest of care, this journey will inevitably affect the quality of herb by the time it reaches your cup.

In summary, this result further strengthens our belief that growing your own herbs yields the highest quality. Along with the added benefits of sustainability, enhancing local biodiversity, and the immense satisfaction of nurturing plants from seed, it’s clear that growing your own herbs is truly hard to beat.