Butterfly Pea Flower Tea, Whole Dried Clitoria ternatea for Color-Changing Blue Herbal Infusions and Cocktails

🫖 Hot & iced blue tea

About one tablespoon of whole dried flowers per 8 oz of hot (not boiling) water. Steep 5 to 7 minutes. The brew goes deep cobalt-blue. Pair with our loose leaf tea collection for blends.

🍸 Color-changing cocktails

A bartender's natural pigment. Cold-infuse the flowers in gin, vodka, or simple syrup overnight. Acid (citrus) shifts blue to violet to magenta in real time at the rim of the glass.

🍚 Natural culinary color

Used traditionally in Thai and Malay kitchens to color rice (nasi kerabu), dumplings, and desserts. Caffeine-free, gluten-free, dairy-free. Steep the flowers, then strain and cook with the blue liquid.

🌸 Blends for daily ritual

Sits well in antioxidant-forward herbal blends alongside hibiscus, rose hips, and lemon balm. Easy on the palate, easy on the eyes.

Does butterfly pea flower tea actually change color, or is that a marketing trick?

It is genuine pH chemistry, and I get asked this constantly. The blue color comes from anthocyanin pigments inside the petals, the same family of compounds that make red cabbage and elderberries shift color in acidic water. Brew the flowers and you get a stable cobalt-blue cup. Add a squeeze of lemon or lime and within a second or two the cup turns violet, then deepens toward magenta as more acid hits it. Hit it with something alkaline like a pinch of baking soda and it swings green. Nothing about this is dye or food coloring, it is the same plant chemistry happening live in your glass.

How do I brew the best blue tea from these whole dried flowers?

My standing recipe: roughly one tablespoon of whole flowers per 8 ounces of hot water that has come off the boil for about 30 seconds (around 200°F). Steep 5 to 7 minutes, longer if you want a saturated cobalt color for a cocktail base. Strain. The flavor is delicate and earthy with notes of button mushroom, squid ink, and sugar snap pea, so I lean on it as a base rather than a stand-alone tea. It loves lemongrass, ginger, mint, hibiscus, and a small spoon of honey. For iced or for cocktail work, cold-brew the flowers in cool water or spirits overnight in the fridge for a cleaner, more vivid pigment with no astringency.

How do I know what's actually in the bag I'm buying?

Every lot we sell carries a third-party Certificate of Analysis that screens for botanical identity, heavy metals, pesticide residues, and microbial contamination. The full historical list of batch COAs for this product lives on our Butterfly Pea Flower COA page, so you can match the batch in your hands against its own paperwork. If you have not read a lab report before, our plain-language COA guide walks through which numbers matter and which are noise.

Is it safe to drink butterfly pea flower tea every day?

For most healthy adults, daily tea-quantity use (one to two cups a day) is well tolerated. The populations I tell clients to pause and check with a practitioner first are anyone pregnant, trying to conceive, or breastfeeding, anyone on blood thinners or antiplatelet medication, anyone on blood-pressure or blood-sugar-lowering medication, and anyone with a known legume allergy. If you fall outside those buckets, my advice is simple: start with one cup a day for the first week, see how you respond, then build from there. Concentrated extracts and tinctures are a different conversation from a tea brewed from whole flowers.