I keep a pot of lemongrass on the balcony, and the honest reason is not tea. It's that when you brush past it, the whole corner smells like someone cut a lemon. The plant does this with no lemon in it anywhere.
That trick is most of what makes lemongrass interesting, and it's worth understanding before you decide how you want to drink it.
It is a grass. That is not a figure of speech.
Lemongrass belongs to the same botanical family as rice, wheat and bamboo. It is not related to lemons, limes, oranges or anything else with a citrus in it. Cut a stalk open and there's no pulp, no juice, no segments. It's a grass with a thick pale base, and it grows in clumps the way pampas grass does.
The lemon smell comes from citral, a compound the plant makes in its leaves and stem. Lemon peel makes citral too, which is why the two smell like cousins. They aren't. Two unrelated plants arrived at the same molecule, and our noses can't tell the difference.
Here's the part that surprises people who've only smelled it: lemongrass isn't sour. Lemons are sour because of citric acid, and lemongrass has essentially none. So you get the whole bright lemon aroma and then a cup that is faintly sweet and grassy, with nothing sharp behind it. If you've made lemongrass tea expecting a nimbu pani kind of tang, that gap is the plant being what it is, not the brew going wrong.
What Indians already do with it
Quite a lot, depending where you are.
In Maharashtra it's gavti chaha, and it goes into regular milk tea. Leaves torn and thrown in with the tea leaves, boiled together, strained. Ask anyone from Pune about gavti chaha and you won't need to explain lemongrass to them. It's an old, ordinary household drink, not a wellness import.
In the south it turns up in buttermilk, in rasam, and as a plain hot infusion. Along the coast it gets used more like a cooking herb than a tea leaf.
And India grows an enormous amount of it, though mostly not for any of the above. Commercially, lemongrass here is an oil crop. Fields of it get harvested and distilled for the oil, which goes into soaps, cleaners, fragrances and pest repellents. The tea market is a rounding error next to that. Kerala and the northeast are the big growing regions.
Which part do you actually use?
Depends what you're making, and this trips people up constantly.
Thai and Vietnamese cooking uses the stalk, specifically the fat pale section at the bottom. You bruise it with the back of a knife, drop it into the curry or soup whole, and fish it out later. That part is too fibrous to eat but it perfumes everything around it.
Tea uses the leaves, the long thin green blades, usually dried and cut. That's what's in a tea bag, and it's why loose lemongrass tea looks like chopped hay.
Both parts contain citral. The leaf is lighter and more floral, the stalk is deeper and slightly more soapy if you overdo it. Neither is wrong, they just make different drinks.
Growing it, which is easier than it sounds
Buy fresh stalks from a vegetable market or a good grocer, the kind sold for cooking, and check that the base is intact rather than sliced flat. Stand a few in a glass with two inches of water on a bright windowsill. Change the water every couple of days.
Within two or three weeks you'll see white roots. Plant them in a pot with drainage and put them somewhere sunny. In most of India lemongrass will then get on with it by itself, needing water and very little else. It dies back in a cold north Indian winter and comes up again in spring.
One clump gives you more leaf than you can drink. This is the rare herb where growing your own genuinely beats buying it.
What the research says, minus the enthusiasm
Most published work on lemongrass is about the essential oil, not the tea, and that's a distinction worth holding onto.
The oil has been studied fairly extensively in laboratory conditions, largely for how it behaves against microbes and insects. That work is real, and it's also the reason lemongrass oil ends up in so many cleaning products. It says very little about a cup of tea, because a distilled oil at laboratory concentrations and a leaf infusion in a mug are not the same thing at any level.
Studies on drinking lemongrass are fewer, smaller and shorter. Findings are mixed and the sample sizes are modest. Anyone quoting you a confident number about what lemongrass tea does is going well past what the literature actually supports.
What is solid: long food use, no caffeine in the plant itself, and a flavour a lot of people enjoy. That's a reasonable thing for a herb to be.
Why it's in UPLIFT
Aroma, mainly.
UPLIFT is a morning blend with green tea, tulsi, ginseng, amla, ginger and moringa in it. Several of those are bitter or earthy. Lemongrass is what you smell first when the cup is poured, before any of that arrives, and a morning drink that smells good matters more than people admit at seven in the morning.
It also works with the lemon peel in the blend rather than duplicating it. Peel brings a little bitterness and oil, lemongrass brings the top note and no acid at all. Together they read as lemon from two directions.
Frequently asked questions
Does lemongrass tea have caffeine?
Lemongrass itself has none. UPLIFT does contain green tea, so the blend is caffeine-light rather than caffeine-free. Plain lemongrass leaf brewed on its own has nothing.
Can I use the stalks from the market for tea?
Yes. Bruise the pale base, slice it, and steep the pieces in water just off the boil for about five minutes. It'll be stronger and rounder than a leaf infusion.
Is gavti chaha the same as lemongrass tea?
Same plant. Gavti chaha is usually lemongrass boiled into milk tea with regular tea leaves. Lemongrass tea, as sold, is normally the dried leaf infused in plain water.
Why does mine taste soapy?
Too much leaf or too long in the water. Citral turns waxy when it's concentrated. Cut the quantity or the time and it goes back to being pleasant.
Can I drink it at night?
Plain lemongrass, certainly. UPLIFT has green tea in it, so we suggest it for mornings and UNWIND later on.
Where to start
Go buy three stalks, root one in a glass and use the other two. It costs almost nothing and you'll have the plant for years.
If you'd rather it arrived already blended, lemongrass carries the top of the cup in UPLIFT. EASE handles the hour after a meal, and the Complete Ritual has all three blends together.
Also in that morning cup: moringa, the bitter green floor underneath, and amla, which supplies the sourness lemongrass never does.