What is Kratom Tea?
Kratom Tea has a long history in Southeast Asia and has been used traditionally for thousands of years. In America we use powdered Kratom in hot water like a tea suspension. In Southeast Asia Kratom Tea would be fresh leaves brewed in a kettle for a few hours or leaves just plucked from the tree and chewed fresh. Leaves are thrown out once the brewing is complete.
Traditional preparations of Kratom didn’t include the ingestion of the powder itself. Like most Tea preparations the leaves were discarded afterwards. I made fresh brewed tea from leaves and brewed Kratom tea powder in a kettle for hours to see the difference.
There is a difference in the effects of kratom and how it works when using fresh brewed Tea or brewing the powder and discarding the plant material. Not a bad difference but just different. I suggest trying the powder brewed at least once to try it out.
You can simmer the powder on the stovetop for hours for even stronger effects. I have heard of people even reusing kratom powder after they simmered it, but that seems a bit messy. Just brew it if possible, on a low heat such as 160-degree Fahrenheit for a few hours to enhance strength.

What Will You Need?
I use 1/4 cup Bragg’s apple cider vinegar in the water while brewing. Half gallon of water to ¼ cup vinegar. Lemon Juice works too. The acids seem to break down the Kratom alkaloids a bit better. You can skip the vinegar or lemon juice if you just can’t stand the taste of it, but it does help.
I used about 4 oz kratom powder for a half gallon of water for the recipe. The half-gallon will give you a little over a quart usable tea when finished. I simmer on the stovetop for 45 minutes on medium heat until a slow rolling boil occurs. I have an electric stove, so I keep it at 6-7.
I use the strainer that comes with the Magical Butter machine, but these strainers can be purchased separately on the Magical website.

Brewed Kratom Tea
The result is a brewed Kratom tea without having to ingest the powder. There will be a bit of residual powder left, but nothing much after the tea is strained properly. I do strain the kratom tea twice to make sure that I get most of the powder and out of the tea itself.
The breakdown is approximately 3.5 grams of powdered kratom per oz of tea. This is basically a kratom tea reduction at home.
We started with 64 oz plus 2 oz of vinegar for 66 oz total. Reduced to 34 oz divided by 112 grams would give you about 3.5-4 grams per oz. The ratio of 3.5 grams to an oz of water can be adjusted to the strength you would like.
A Stronger or weaker Kratom Tea reduction would require more or less leaf material. Try it out with 2 oz instead for a weaker version. Some people find it hard to digest the leaf material, so this recipe can help remove the material from your diet.
Click here to see the Brewing Kratom Tea slideshow post for more pics
Just something I wanted to share that recipe with you, and it can help mix up the kratom monotony. It does take some time but is good to have some on hand for that quick out the door boost.
You can even make a twist and create a cold brew kratom tea.
Conclusion
2023 will in my opinion be the year that truly launches Mitragyna Speciosa into the mainstream and people are seeing the power of plants! We are Kratom!
We as a community need to stick together and not allow anything to tear us apart. The only way we won in 2016 was unity!
Bottom line we had unity. We need to get that unity again so we can defeat anything that comes our way that jeopardizes us, or the future of kratom. Too many politics are getting in the way of our community.
Let us come together the way that we were in 2016! WE ARE KRATOM!
You mentioned that the alkaloids break down in the presence of acids, which was a bit of a concern. Heat and acids do break them down but pretty slowly. There is a decent article in Analytical Toxicology, “Temperature and pH-Dependent Stability of Mitragyna Alkaloids” at
https://academic.oup.com/jat/article/44/4/314/5693674
There is also a recent but pretty dense (i.e. geeky) article in Frontiers in Pharmacology, “Kratom Alkaloids: Interactions With Enzymes, Receptors, and Cellular Barriers”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8637859/
cheers,