Astra Hemp Pyramid Hemp Tea Bags, Black Tea

Hemp seed oil is not CBD, and this tea is described both ways

The manufacturer describes this product as a black tea with twenty five milligrams of hemp seed oil in each pyramid bag. So do four independent sellers, one of which lists the same tea twice under two names, once calling it hemp seed oil and once calling it CBD.

Our own distributor describes it differently. Its page says the tea features seven and a half milligrams of CBD in each pyramid bag.

Those are not two ways of saying the same thing, and the difference is the whole product.

Hemp seed oil is cold-pressed from the seeds of the hemp plant. Seeds carry essentially no cannabinoids, because the cannabinoids are made in the flower and the leaf. Hemp seed oil is a culinary oil. You can buy it in a supermarket next to the rapeseed and the walnut oil, it is used in dressings, and it is notable for its fatty acid profile rather than for anything to do with CBD. A tea made with hemp seed oil is a hemp tea. It is not a CBD tea.

There is one more detail that makes us think the CBD figure is the mistaken one. Seven and a half milligrams multiplied by the twenty bags in the box comes to one hundred and fifty milligrams, and one hundred and fifty milligrams across twenty pyramid bags is exactly the stated strength of a completely different tea we already sell, the MediCBD CBD Tea Pyramid Bags. It looks very much like one product's specification has been copied onto another.

We cannot open the box and test it, so we are not going to tell you as a fact that there is no CBD in this tea. We have asked our supplier for a straight answer. What we can tell you is that the company that makes it says hemp seed oil, that hemp seed oil is not CBD, and that if what you want is CBD in a cup of tea you should buy one where every source agrees there is CBD in it.

None of this makes it a bad product. A hemp seed oil black tea is a perfectly good thing to sell and a pleasant thing to drink. It is only a problem when it is put on a CBD shelf, and that includes ours.

It is a black tea, so it is not caffeine-free

The same distributor page describes these as caffeine-free hemp tea bags.

Black tea is made from Camellia sinensis, the tea plant, and it contains caffeine. That is what black tea is. A black tea is only caffeine-free if it has been decaffeinated, and nothing on any listing for this product says it has been.

So that is the second checkable error on one page, and it is the one more likely to actually inconvenience somebody. A person choosing a tea for the evening on the strength of the words caffeine-free would be misled by it.

Astra Hemp also makes a green tea version of this product, which is not stocked here and which is also made from Camellia sinensis and also contains caffeine.

If a caffeine-free hemp drink is what you are after, a herbal infusion is the format that gives you that, because it is made from plants other than the tea plant. Our Hempthy tea listing goes into a related question, where one published declaration for a peppermint tea included a caffeinated ingredient and another did not.

Our own record for this product is wrong too

It would be poor form to point at two errors on somebody else's page without mentioning the ones on ours.

Our catalogue currently records this product with its cannabinoid type set to isolate, and files it in the CBD drinks aisle. If the manufacturer is right and there is hemp seed oil rather than CBD in the bag, then both of those are wrong. There is no isolate in a seed oil, and a tea with no CBD in it does not belong on a CBD shelf.

That has been logged for correction along with the request to our supplier. Depending on the answer, this product either gets recategorised as a hemp tea or it comes off the site.

We are telling you that rather than quietly fixing it because the whole point of a page like this is that you can trust what is on it. A shop that only ever finds errors in other people's data is not looking very hard at its own.

What it is like, and what a pyramid bag is for

As a black tea it is straightforward and fairly robust, with the faint nutty note that hemp seed oil gives anything. It is closer to an everyday breakfast tea than to a delicate one, and it takes milk without falling apart.

The brewing instruction is two to five minutes, which is normal for black tea and considerably shorter than the five to ten minutes CBD teas are usually given.

The pyramid bag is worth a word because it is not just packaging. A flat paper bag compresses the leaf into a tight disc and water struggles to move through it, which is why ordinary teabags need squeezing. A pyramid gives the leaf room to open and the water room to circulate, so a larger leaf can be used and the brew comes out cleaner. It is a genuine improvement and it is the main practical thing this product has going for it.

On the question of how much of anything makes it from a bag into a cup, that is a real issue for CBD teas and we have set it out on the Hempthy tea listing. Here it is largely moot, because on the manufacturer's description there is no CBD in the bag to worry about.

One line on who makes it. Astra Hemp is one of several brand names used by Multitrance of Amsterdam, which also supplies MediCBD. We have written about what that means for reading a CBD shelf on the Astra Hemp chewing gum listing.

Who should skip this tea

Anyone who wants CBD. On the manufacturer's own description this is a hemp seed oil tea, and if CBD in a hot drink is the point of the purchase then the MediCBD or Hempthy teas are the ones where every source agrees there is CBD in the bag.

Anyone avoiding caffeine. It is a black tea. The caffeine-free wording on one listing is wrong, and we would rather correct it than let it sell a box.

Anyone who wants the question settled before they order. We have asked our supplier and have not had an answer yet. Ask us again, or watch this page, because it will be updated either way.

Anyone who does not drink black tea. There is no herbal version of this product in our range.

And anyone who was buying it because it sat in our CBD drinks aisle. That was our filing error, it is logged, and pointing it out here is the least we can do about it in the meantime.