Four whole cloves, 300 ml of water and ten quiet minutes on a low flame. That is a complete clove tea recipe, and it gives you a cup that is warm, faintly sweet and pleasantly tingly on the tongue. Bad clove tea usually comes from doing too much: too many cloves, a hard boil, or ground spice that turns the cup muddy and harsh.
Below is the method we use, a strength guide so you can tune it, five variations, and then what the research on cloves actually shows, and who should go easy on them.
Recipe card: basic clove tea
| Makes | 1 mug (about 250 ml, or 1 cup) |
|---|---|
| Time | 15 minutes |
| Caffeine | None, unless you add tea |
You need
- 4 whole cloves
- 300 ml (about 1¼ cups) fresh water (a little boils off)
- Honey, jaggery or sugar to taste (optional)
Method
- Press each clove once with the back of a spoon so it cracks. The flavour comes out faster.
- Put the cloves and water in a small pan and bring it to the boil.
- Turn the heat right down, cover the pan and simmer for 8 to 10 minutes. The lid keeps the aroma in the cup instead of in your kitchen.
- Take it off the heat, strain into a mug and sweeten if you like.
The tea should be pale amber, smell of cloves before you taste it, and leave a gentle tingle. If it tastes sharp or medicinal, you used too many cloves or cooked them too hard.
Strength guide: how many cloves per cup
Cloves are small and potent. Here is how the count changes a 250 ml cup simmered for 8 to 10 minutes:
| Whole cloves per cup | What you get | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Light and warm, clove in the background | First-timers, or with black tea and milk |
| 3 to 4 | Clear clove flavour, slight tingle | Everyday plain clove tea |
| 5 to 6 | Bold, woody, noticeable numbing | Iced clove tea (the ice dilutes it) |
| 7 or more | Bitter and mouth-numbing | We would not bother |
Simmer time is your second dial. Five minutes gives a softer cup. Past 15, it turns bitter without getting more interesting.
Ground clove works in a pinch. Use about ⅛ teaspoon per cup, simmer for only 3 to 4 minutes, and strain through a paper filter or a fine cloth, or you will be drinking grit. Whole cloves give a cleaner cup, and you can see exactly how much you have used.
Five ways to change it
With Ceylon black tea. This is how we drink it most often. Simmer 3 cloves as above, take the pan off the heat, then add one tea bag or a heaped teaspoon of Ceylon black tea and steep for 3 to 4 minutes, the time the UK Tea & Infusions Association gives for most black teas, Ceylon Dimbula included. Add the tea after the simmer, not during it. Ten minutes of boiling stews black tea and the cup goes bitter. A strong, fine grade such as BOPF stands up to both clove and milk. If you would rather not measure spices at all, our Heritage Masala Chai already blends clove with ginger, cumin, lemongrass, fennel, cardamom, cinnamon, star anise and black pepper on a BOPF Ceylon base.
With cinnamon. Add a 5 cm (2 in) piece of cinnamon quill to the pan with 3 cloves. Cinnamon brings its own sweetness, so you may want less honey. We use organic Ceylon cinnamon quills, thin rolled layers of bark that snap easily into the pan.
With ginger. Add 3 or 4 thin slices of fresh ginger at the start of the simmer. Ginger's heat and clove's warmth suit a cold, wet evening, and the pair works with or without black tea.
With honey and lemon. Let the tea cool for a minute, stir in honey, then add a thin slice of lemon. One caution: do not give honey to a baby under one year old. The NHS advises against it because of the rare risk of infant botulism.
Iced clove tea. Make it double strength: 6 cloves in 300 ml, simmered for 10 minutes, with a cinnamon quill if you like. Sweeten while it is hot so the sugar dissolves, let it cool, then pour it over a full glass of ice with a squeeze of lime. For a softer version, drop 6 cracked cloves into 500 ml (about 2 cups) of cold water and leave it in the fridge overnight. There are more cold-tea ideas in our guide to iced tea in Sri Lanka.
What cloves bring to the cup
Nearly all the flavour, and nearly all the research interest, comes from one compound: eugenol. Sri Lanka's Department of Export Agriculture puts eugenol at 72 to 90% of the essential oil extracted from cloves, and names it as the compound most responsible for their aroma. A 2014 review in the Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine describes clove as one of the richest sources of phenolic compounds, including eugenol, eugenol acetate and gallic acid. Eugenol is also why a strong cup numbs your tongue: it has long been used on the gums for toothache.
Sri Lanka grows its own. Clove is cultivated mainly in the mid-country wet zone, with Kandy, Kegalle and Matale the major districts across 7,618 hectares.
Plain clove tea has no tea leaf in it, so it has no caffeine. Add black tea and you are back to an ordinary cup of tea, roughly 25 to 48 mg of caffeine, as we explain in our look at the health benefits of Ceylon tea.
The benefits: what the research does and does not show
Here is the problem with many clove tea claims. The studies behind them usually test concentrated extracts or clove oil, not a mug of simmered cloves. A cup of clove tea is a light water infusion. Read what follows as context, not a promise.
- Antioxidants. In laboratory tests, clove's antioxidant activity is higher than that of many fruits, vegetables and other spices, according to the 2014 review. A test-tube score tells you about the spice. It does not tell you what a cup does inside your body.
- Blood sugar. A 2019 pilot study in BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies gave 13 volunteers a 250 mg capsule of polyphenol-rich clove extract every day for 30 days. After-meal blood glucose fell 21.5% in the group with normal glucose and 27.2% in the prediabetic group. Interesting, yes. It was also tiny, open label, had no placebo group and used a concentrated extract. It does not show that clove tea manages blood sugar.
- Teeth and gums. Eugenol's use for toothache is real, but that means concentrated oil applied to the gum. A cup of clove tea is not a dental treatment. If a tooth hurts, see a dentist.
- Weight loss. We could not find a human trial showing that clove tea causes weight loss. What an unsweetened cup can do is replace a sugary drink, and that swap is worth having on its own.
That is less exciting than some headlines. It is also what the evidence supports, and we would rather you drink clove tea because you like it than because you expect it to fix something.
Who should go easy on clove tea
The cautions below are mostly about larger amounts and concentrated oil, not a cup made with a few cloves. They are still worth knowing before clove tea becomes a daily habit.
| Situation | What to know |
|---|---|
| Blood thinners or a bleeding disorder | Clove may slow blood clotting and could add to the effect of anticoagulant or antiplatelet medicines, WebMD's clove guide notes. Ask your doctor first. |
| Surgery coming up | The same guide advises stopping clove at least 2 weeks before a scheduled operation. |
| Diabetes medication | Clove may lower blood sugar, so alongside medication it could push levels too low. Talk to your doctor before drinking it regularly. |
| Pregnancy or breastfeeding | There is not enough reliable safety data on larger amounts. Stick to food amounts. |
| Children | Keep clove oil well out of reach. The US National Institutes of Health's LiverTox database describes severe liver injury in infants and young children who swallowed clove oil, in amounts as small as 8 to 10 ml. |
| Liver | LiverTox ties liver injury to overdoses of the oil, and notes that the low concentrations of eugenol and clove extract in herbal products have not been convincingly linked to it. |
Our own rule is simple. Treat clove tea as a drink you enjoy, not a dose you take: three or four cloves a cup, a cup or two a day, and a word with your doctor first if any line in that table applies to you.
Questions we get about clove tea
Can I reuse the cloves for a second cup? Once. The second simmer gives a noticeably lighter cup, so add one fresh clove to lift it. After that there is little left to extract.
Why does my clove tea taste bitter? Usually one of three things: too many cloves, a hard rolling boil instead of a simmer, or ground clove left in too long. Drop to three whole cloves, keep the heat low and cap the simmer at 10 minutes.
Is clove tea good with milk? Plain clove tea with milk tastes thin, because there is nothing to carry the milk. Add black tea first, as in the Ceylon black tea variation above, then the milk. The tea gives the body that clove alone lacks.
Start with good cloves
Every version above depends on the cloves. Ours are organic whole cloves from Sri Lanka, in a 50 g pack that suits both the teapot and the curry pot. Pair them with a strong Ceylon black tea, get the water and timing right with our notes on the art of the perfect brew, and you have a cup worth making again tomorrow.