CBD and Hemp Tea UK

What is in one cup, across all six lines

Pack totals are the currency of this category and they are close to useless. A 150mg pack and a 160mg pack sound like the same product. They are not, because one holds twenty bags and the other holds ten.

Multitrance, MediCBD and Astra Hemp all use the same pyramid format and the same wording: 7.5mg of CBD in each bag, twenty bags, 150mg a pack. Hempthy does something different, putting 16mg in each bag across ten bags for 160mg a pack. Per cup, the Hempthy is more than twice the strength of everything else here, and it is the only line on this shelf made in the UK.

Two lines carry no figure at all. Professor Herb's Instant Hemp Tea is a hemp blend with chamomile and lemon balm, sold as an instant rather than a bag. The Multitrance Cannabis Tea in Silver Haze is flavour led and currently out of stock at both our distributors.

One line needs a caveat and we would rather give it here than bury it. The Astra Hemp pack is named as a hemp tea, and our catalogue records no cannabinoid figure for it, but the description our distributor supplies states 7.5mg a bag in wording almost identical to the MediCBD listing, which suggests boilerplate rather than a specification. The product page for that tea sets out both readings in full. Until it is confirmed, buy it as a hemp tea.

Can a black tea be caffeine free

Three brands on this shelf describe their pyramid range as caffeine free, in the same boilerplate wording. That range includes Black Tea and Green Tea.

Black tea carries roughly thirty to sixty milligrams of caffeine in a cup. Green tea carries less but is not caffeine free either. Both come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis, and caffeine is in the leaf. Rooibos and camomile are different plants entirely and are genuinely caffeine free, as is hemp.

So the blanket claim cannot be right for the whole range, and there are only two ways to read it. Either these blends are hemp and herb infusions merely styled as black and green tea, in which case caffeine free is accurate and the naming is what misleads. Or they contain real tea leaf, in which case the caffeine free claim is wrong on two of the four blends.

We do not know which, and nobody selling these teas in the UK appears to have asked. We have. Until we get an answer, the honest position is the one in the table below: some of this shelf is caffeine free beyond argument, and some of it depends on a question the packaging does not settle.

Worth knowing that at least one UK CBD tea brand splits its own range explicitly into caffeinated and caffeine free lines, so the distinction is both real and commercially normal. It is not an unreasonable thing to expect a pack to be clear about.

What steeping does, and the CBDa problem

This is the most important thing about hemp tea and it appears exactly once in the entire set of pages ranking for this search, buried inside a review of somebody else's product.

Raw hemp does not contain much CBD. It contains CBDa, the acidic form, which converts to CBD through decarboxylation. That conversion needs sustained heat well above the temperature of a kettle, in the region of 120 degrees for an hour or more. A three minute steep at ninety-odd degrees does not do it.

So a tea made from raw hemp leaf delivers CBDa rather than CBD, and the two are not the same compound. That is not a defect and CBDa is perfectly interesting in its own right, but a pack that says hemp and a pack that says CBD are describing different things, and the difference is chemistry rather than marketing.

The lines on this shelf that print a milligram figure are a different case. Where a manufacturer states 7.5mg or 16mg of CBD in a bag, that is CBD added as an ingredient rather than CBDa waiting to be converted, which is why those lines can put a number on it and a raw hemp tea cannot.

There is a second, separate problem, and it is the one our drinks aisle covers in full: cannabinoids do not dissolve well in water, so what is in the bag and what ends up in the cup are not the same quantity. Adding milk or another fat during the steep helps. That argument is made properly on the CBD drinks page and there is no sense repeating it here.

Between the two effects, read the number on the pack as what went in rather than what you get out. Every honest page in this category should say that and none of them does.

Brewing, by blend rather than by rule

The pages ranking for this term give one instruction for every tea they sell. One says five to ten minutes for everything. Another says two to four minutes in boiling water for everything. Both are wrong for at least half of what is on this shelf, because these are four quite different plants.

Black tea takes boiling water and four to five minutes. It is robust and hard to spoil, which is why it is the default blend in most ranges.

Green tea does not want boiling water. Around eighty degrees, so a kettle left to stand for a minute or two, and two to three minutes of steeping. Boiling water on green tea draws out bitterness and nothing useful.

Camomile and rooibos are the opposite: both want boiling water and a long steep, five minutes upward, and neither goes bitter if you forget about it. They are the forgiving end of the shelf.

The Hempthy peppermint blend behaves like a herbal infusion too, so boiling water and a good five minutes.

Two general points that apply whatever you are brewing. A pyramid bag exists to give the leaf room to move, so it works better in a mug than crushed into a cup. And a hemp tea can usually take a second brew, which a black tea cannot, because the leaf is not exhausted in the same way.

Cannabinoids degrade with sustained heat rather than instantly, so a normal steep is not a problem. A pot left on a hot plate for an hour is a different matter.

How this shelf compares with the rest of the UK market

Since we are the ones publishing per-bag figures, it is only fair to publish where they sit against everyone else, and it is not flattering across the board.

The strongest bagged CBD tea we found while researching this page states 400mg in a single pyramid bag. Others run at 15mg a bag, and one well-known line adds water-soluble CBD at 5mg a cup. Our shelf runs 7.5mg on the pyramid teas and 16mg on the Hempthy.

So we sit in the middle to lower part of that range, above the 5mg products and well below the specialist high-strength ones. What we have instead is breadth of blend, which the strong specialist teas generally do not run to, and one genuinely UK-made line.

If a high figure per cup is the thing you care about, be honest with yourself that tea is a difficult format for it in the first place, for the two reasons set out above. Our CBD oil aisle will give you a measured amount with none of the extraction problem, and the gummies aisle gives you a printed figure per piece that actually reaches you.

The law, and what these products are

A CBD tea may be sold in the UK when the whole container holds no more than 1mg of controlled cannabinoids, when it is made from a permitted hemp variety, and when it meets UK food law, which for anything ingestible includes the Novel Foods regime.

Per container. Not per bag, not per cup, and not as a percentage of anything. A pack of twenty bags is held to the same 1mg as a pack of ten.

This is the point where the pages ranking for CBD tea simply stop. One gives its legal position as being certified THC free by a laboratory, which is a claim about a product rather than a statement of the rule. One says hemp tea is legal in the UK and gives no threshold whatsoever. A third publishes three thousand words about UK CBD teas with no legal content at all. The summarised answer this search engine returns for the term quotes a percentage figure that belongs to hemp cultivation licensing and has nothing to do with what may be sold to a consumer.

Alongside the law, the Food Standards Agency advises healthy adults to keep CBD from food supplements to no more than 10mg a day, guidance announced in October 2023. On this shelf that is roughly one Hempthy bag, or a bit more than one pyramid bag. It is precautionary advice rather than a legal ceiling, and it is not an instruction from us.

The usual conditions and they are not filler. Over-18s only. These are food products rather than medicines and nobody selling them may tell you what they do for a health condition, which is worth saying on this shelf in particular, because some of the manufacturer copy behind these products is written in exactly that register and none of it appears on our pages. If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, or you take prescription medication, speak to a GP or pharmacist first.

Which one to buy, and when to buy something else

If you want the most in a cup, the Hempthy at 16mg a bag, and it is UK made.

If you want choice of blend, the Multitrance pyramid range, which runs black, camomile, green and rooibos against everyone else's one or two.

If you want a guaranteed caffeine free cup, take camomile or rooibos rather than trusting the phrase on the box, or take the Professor Herb instant, which is herbal throughout.

If you want it fast, the Professor Herb instant is the only line here that does not need steeping.

Now the honest cautions. Tea is the least efficient way to take a cannabinoid that we sell, for two independent reasons: poor water solubility, and the CBDa question on any raw hemp line. The figures on this shelf are modest against the strongest UK teas. Two of the six lines carry no cannabinoid figure at all and are hemp or flavour products. And the caffeine claim on the black and green blends is unresolved, which matters if you are drinking it in the evening.

If you want a measured, reliable amount, this is the wrong aisle and CBD oil is the right one. If you want something warm with a figure you can trust, the hot chocolate and coffee sachets in our drinks aisle bring their own fat to the cup, which is the one thing tea cannot do for itself.