Make a cup of herbal tea with no sugar in it, drink half, and notice something. It's sweet. Not sugary, but definitely sweet, and the sweetness turns up a beat after you swallow rather than on the tongue straight away.
That is almost always licorice root. It's in most blended herbal teas sold anywhere, it is doing more work than any other ingredient in the tin, and hardly anyone buying the tea could name it.
So here is the one herb in our blends that nobody asks about, and the four things people get wrong about it.
Wrong thing one: that it's the candy
Say licorice in most of the world and people think of a black chewy sweet.
Two problems with that. First, a lot of what gets sold as licorice candy is flavoured with anise oil, which tastes similar and comes from a different plant entirely. Second, the American red variety contains no licorice of any kind and never has.
The actual thing is a root. In India you can buy it as mulethi, pale woody sticks sold by weight, and older relatives will tell you about chewing one. Break a piece and the outside is rough fibrous brown bark while the inside is a clean pale yellow. It smells faintly of hay and tastes intensely sweet before the slightly bitter, almost mineral finish arrives.
Sanskrit calls it yashtimadhu, sweet stick. Gujarati has jethimadh. The Greek name it carries in Latin, Glycyrrhiza, means the same thing: sweet root. Everyone who met this plant named it after the sweetness. They all noticed the same thing.
Wrong thing two: that the sweetness is sugar
It isn't, and this is the interesting part.
The sweet compound in licorice is glycyrrhizin, and weight for weight it is tens of times sweeter than table sugar. It's also chemically nothing like sugar, which is why it behaves so differently in the mouth.
Sugar hits immediately and clears. Licorice arrives late, builds slowly, and then sits there for a surprisingly long time. If you've ever finished a herbal tea and found the sweetness still present a minute later, that's the difference in shape between the two.
That late arrival is exactly why blenders use it. Put licorice in a mix of bitter and earthy herbs and it fills the gap at the end of the sip where a cup without it just stops. Nothing has been added. The plant brought its own.
Wrong thing three: that it's a filler
The opposite, really. Licorice and green tea are the only two things that appear in all three of our blends, and licorice is there for a different reason in each.
In EASE it sits under the fennel and cumin, both of which are sharp and seedy, and keeps the cup from reading as savoury.
In UPLIFT it has a harder job, because amla is genuinely sour and moringa is genuinely bitter. Without licorice that blend is a bracing thing to meet at seven in the morning.
In UNWIND it's doing something gentler, rounding off chamomile and valerian, both of which have an edge people don't always expect.
Three blends, one ingredient, three different problems solved. That's not filler, that's the most versatile thing on the shelf.
Wrong thing four: that natural means unlimited
This is the one worth reading properly, because licorice is a genuine exception among culinary herbs.
Most kitchen plants you can be relaxed about. Licorice is one of the few where the quantity actually matters, and that isn't folk caution, it's well established and it's why several countries have published guidance on how much concentrated licorice is sensible to consume regularly.
The scale matters here. The guidance concerns concentrated licorice taken in quantity and daily over long stretches, the sort of thing that happens with licorice supplements, licorice extract, or eating a great deal of real licorice confectionery. It is a different order of magnitude from one herb among eleven or thirteen in a tea bag.
Still, two groups should ask a doctor before making concentrated licorice a daily habit: anyone with high blood pressure, and anyone pregnant. That is a sentence you should expect from anyone selling you a herb and rarely get.
What research actually covers
Quite a lot, by herbal standards, and most of it on licorice extract rather than on tea.
Laboratory work on the root's compounds is extensive. Human trials exist, tend to be small, and generally use concentrated preparations at doses a tea could not deliver. As with most of these plants, the reviews end somewhere around "warrants further study".
What that supports is calling licorice a long-used root with a distinctive sweetness and a research base still being built. What it does not support is any claim about what a cup of tea containing it will do, and we're not going to make one.
Frequently asked questions
Is mulethi the same as licorice?
Yes. Same root, Hindi name. Yashtimadhu and jethimadh are the same plant again.
Why does my herbal tea taste sweet with no sugar added?
Almost certainly licorice. Check the ingredient list, it's usually there and usually near the end where people stop reading.
Can I chew the stick like my grandmother did?
You can. Buy mulethi sticks from a kirana shop or a spice seller, and treat them as a thing you chew occasionally rather than all day, for the reason in the section above.
Does licorice have caffeine?
The root has none. All three of our blends contain green tea, so they are caffeine-light rather than caffeine-free.
Is there sugar in the blends?
No. Nothing sweet is added to any of them. What you taste is the root.
Where to start
Next time you drink any herbal tea, sugar-free and unflavoured, pay attention to the two seconds after you swallow. Once you've identified that late sweetness you will find it everywhere, and you'll start reading ingredient lists differently.
Licorice is in all three of ours. UPLIFT in the morning, EASE after eating, UNWIND at night, or the Complete Ritual for all three.
More on the herbs licorice is balancing: amla, which supplies the sourness, and fennel, which supplies the seed note it softens.