How to Make Weed Tea from Stems

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s something you can use all those leftover stems from your cured and now-stripped marijuana buds, the answer is: Yes! You can make cannabis tea!

It’s an amazing alternative to smoking or consuming cannabis edibles, and to be honest, sometimes there’s just something that much cozier about sipping on a nice hot drink of marijuana-infused tea on a cold and dreary day or just before bed.

It also comes with the health benefits of not harming your lungs with smoke, and eliminating the added preservative and/or processed sugars that often appear in numerous edibles.

Before getting into some of the medical benefits of making tea from your marijuana stems, the answer to the question of if it will get you high is: Yes, provided you use a high-THC strain for it–generally speaking, 20% THC content and above should be good.

Some other factors that will determine how high marijuana stem tea will get you are as follows: your body composition, your THC tolerance levels, the quantity and quality of the stems you use, whether you use a binding agent or not (if you don’t use one, then the THC will not be extracted from the cannabis plant material you’re using), and how much THC content is in the marijuana plant you’re using to make your tea.

One last thing worth mentioning here is that weed stem tea might not have much of an impact on daily users who have a high tolerance to THC, but if you make it strong enough, you should still experience some of its effects, but in a more subtle manner.

Making marijuana tea, which is a powerful drink with both recreational and medical benefits, is a fabulous way to upcycle your leftover marijuana stems.

In fact, cannabis stem tea is consistently used by medical patients everywhere to potentially alleviate physical and mental health ailments, such as chronic pain, headaches, migraines, stress, anxiety, PTSD-related issues, inflammation, arthritis, gastrointestinal issues, nausea, etc.

For medical users, drinking a cup of cannabis tea not only works to provide relief that much faster but can be an easier or gentler method for those who don’t enjoy combusting it and/or who due to undergoing invasive chemical treatments like chemotherapy or radiation or who are experiencing nausea-inducing migraines find using solid “food” edibles to be difficult due to stomach issues, etc.

In addition, for both medical and recreational users, controlling the dosage in cannabis-infused tea is a lot easier than with edibles, which can hit too intensely for some with a particular body mass or low tolerance level to THC content.

In general, THC stem tea is considered to provide a gentler and milder high with relatively healthier recreational and medicinal perks and to have a less pungent taste than smoking it or even when making tea from leftover buds.

However, this is not to say that you can’t be completely bowled over by marijuana stem tea if it’s made on the stronger side, as many users have said that when they’ve drunk a strongly brewed cup of stem tea it’s actually the highest they’ve been.

Lastly, if you live in a state or region of the world where recreational and/or medical marijuana is legalized, then being able to fill your insulated mug with some weed stem tea can be a super convenient way to consume weed in a less obtrusive way. Or, for example, if you’re planning to go camping with friends, filling up a thermos with a few hot cups of stem tea can be the perfect body-warming and all-around fun share around a campfire on a chilly night out in the woods.

Don’t stop reading here and start scooping your stems into tea bags now that you know that you can make cups of tea from them, as it’s not quite that straightforward, and simply steeping chunks of stems in a cup of hot water isn’t going to produce the desired effects.

That said, while the process does involve some preparation it’s far from daunting, and it’s that much easier because in the sections below, I’ll be providing you with a few different, easy-to-follow recipes for brewing your own weed stem tea. Note that for all of these recipes, using organic cannabis is preferable when possible, but it isn’t a deal breaker if that’s not what you currently have.

As you are probably aware, one of the most common methods for extracting THC from cannabis plant matter is to use a source of fat to make something like cannabis butter or cannabis coconut oil. However, using a fatty substance in hot water will end up with the fatty substances amassing and even coagulating at the surface of your hot weed-based drink, which I think it’s safe to say, most folks don’t want to drink tea with oily substances floating around.

As such, this first recipe involves the use of a small quantity of alcohol, which will evaporate in the cook-off.

• One ounce or 1/4 cup (or double the amount for stronger tea) of weed stems
• Leftover shake or additional cannabis flower to increase strength
• Three cups of water
• Coffee filter
• 2-3 tablespoons of any kind of alcohol, or if you don’t want to use alcohol then the following substitution can work: 1/2 cup of half-and-half or whole milk/non-dairy milk, such as coconut milk
• **Optional: an additional bag of tea, such as Earl Grey or something fruity or floral, to add more flavor.

• Step 1. Most recipes will say that you need ground-up stems, but with this one, you can opt out of this step if you either don’t have a grinder or simply don’t feel like it. Others choose an in-between option of breaking the stems up by hand.
• Step 2. Fill a teapot or saucepan, with 3 cups of water, add the 2-3 tbsp of alcohol (or 1/2 cup of milk/non-dairy milk), and bring to a boil.
• Step 3. Once your brew is bubbling and boiling, add your stems and boil for 7-10 minutes, making sure to stir frequently. (To make your tea even stronger, go ahead and add the additional shake or some ground cannabis at this point). If you want to skip straining your tea in Step 5., then put your stems and shake into a tea bag.
• Step 4. Once the infusion process is done, remove it from the heat.
• Step 5. Strain your stem tea mix using the coffee filter. If you used a teapot, you can secure it around the spout using something simple like a rubber band, and if you used a saucepan, you can secure it around a mug.
• Step 6. Drink and enjoy! Or, before you start sipping on your cup of cannabis stem tea, you might want to add some regular honey or raw sugar. Others like to add some rum and/or a bag of tea.

This recipe is pretty similar to the one above but uses the fat-soluble binding agent of either unsalted butter or coconut oil. Some love this because of the creaminess that butter or coconut oil adds, but others prefer to use the recipe above because they don’t like how the fat collects on the surface of their tea, resulting in a relatively “oily” but soothing drink.

• 1/4 cup or 1 ounce of stems, minimum. If you have a low-THC tolerance level this should be plenty, if you have a higher tolerance level you’ll want to add at least 1/2 cup or 2 ounces of stems if not more. (This may be a little bit of trial by error until you find the right quantity that works for you.)
• 1 tbsp of butter or 1 tbsp of coconut oil
• 1-2 bags of a tea blend of your choice (optional)
• Cannabis honey (optional)
• Tea infuser, or empty tea bag*
• 1 cup water (or 2-3 cups for a weaker tea)

*If you don’t have a tea infuser or empty tea bag, then you can use something like a cheesecloth or coffee filter for straining your tea after it’s boiled.

1. Grind your stems. If you don’t have a proper weed grinder but have an old coffee grinder that you don’t use for coffee anymore that will work too–just make sure you clean any coffee debris out of the grinder before using it and know that you probably won’t want to be grinding your coffee beans in this anymore as completely cleaning any pot residue from it is, while possible, a pain.
2. Boil your 1-3 cups of water, and add your butter or coconut oil at this point. It is important that you add your binding agent before adding your infuser or tea bag or loose stems.
3. Steep your infuser, tea bag, or loose ground-up stems in the hot water for a minimum of 10 minutes. (Some recipes might say 5-10 minutes, but anything under seven minutes is going to give you very weak and possibly ineffective weed stem tea.) This is also when you could add your additional bags of regular, non-cannabis-based tea to the mix to give it some extra flavor.
4. Before you drink your tea, you could add some regular or cannabis-infused honey for flavor and/or added strength. One other option for making your stem tea more potent is to use 1/4 tsp or so of cannabis tincture. In terms of enhancing the tea’s flavor, others like to add mint, lemon, etc. just to mask the “stemminess.”

To wrap things up, I just wanted to share a few strain recommendations for making your weed stem tea, because as already discussed at the beginning of this, using a strain with a high THC content of at least 20% is more likely to result in a potent weed stem tea.

So, five strains with 20% or more THC content that you may like to try when making cannabis tea with stems are listed below:

1. Thin Mint GSC is an exquisite, evenly-balanced dessert strain with 20% THC that’s known for its mint chocolate cookie flavor
2. Lemon G is a unique-tasting, sativa-dominant hybrid with a potent THC level of 22%
3. Shiskaberry a berry-licious, deeply sedating, indica-heavy hybrid with 24% THC
4. Northern Wreck is an indica-dominant hybrid with a titanic THC content of 28% that has a very enchanting sweet and savory flavor profile
5. Cinderella’s Dream is a powerful psychoactive sativa-dominant hybrid with a THC level of 21% and a deliciously spicy taste