5 Traditional Peruvian Uses for Borage Tea (Borraja)

Walk through a market in the Peruvian highlands in late summer and you'll spot borage before you smell it: bright blue, star-shaped flowers on stems covered in fine white hairs. Peruvians call it borraja, and it's one of those herbs that shows up in grandma's kitchen for reasons nobody bothers to explain anymore. It just is what you drink when someone in the house has a cough.

We carry Borage (Borraja) Loose Leaf Herbal Tea, grown in the Andes, and it's worth knowing what this plant is actually used for beyond "it's good for you." Botanically it's Borago officinalis, sometimes called starflower in English, and it grows well at altitude, which is part of why it took hold in Andean home gardens alongside muña and hierba buena. Here are five specific, traditional uses, plus what to know before you steep a cup.

Brewing it is straightforward: one to two teaspoons of the dried leaf, steeped in hot water for about 7 to 10 minutes, strained before drinking. It's caffeine-free, so there's no reason not to have a cup in the evening, and the flavor is mild and slightly grassy, closer to cucumber than anything floral.

1. Soothing a scratchy throat and seasonal cough

This is borage's best-known job in Andean households. The tea has long been used to soothe the throat and ease seasonal respiratory discomfort, the kind that comes with a change of season or the first cold of the school year. It's not a substitute for seeing a doctor if symptoms stick around, but a warm cup at the first sign of a scratchy throat is a habit that's stuck around for generations.

If respiratory support is what you're after more broadly, our respiratory support collection has a few other options worth a look, including eucalyptus and bronquiosan blends.

2. Bringing down a low fever

Borage has a long folk history as a diaphoretic, meaning it's believed to encourage light sweating, which is the traditional logic behind using it for fevers and colds. Older herbal texts describe it as useful "in eruptive fevers." Modern research on borage leaf tea specifically (as opposed to the seed oil, which is a different story, more on that below) is thin, so treat this as inherited household wisdom rather than a clinical claim. For anything beyond a mild, short-lived fever, talk to a doctor.

3. Settling the stomach after a heavy meal

Peruvian cooking doesn't shy away from rich, starchy meals, and borage tea has traditionally been poured afterward to calm digestion. It's grouped with the same after-meal tea culture that gives us muña, boldo, and cedrón: something warm and mild sipped slowly at the table rather than knocked back like medicine.

4. An old mood-lifting reputation

Here's where we'll be honest about the limits of the evidence. Centuries-old herbal writing credits borage with "comforting the heart" and "dispelling melancholy," a lovely phrase that shows up again and again in old texts. There's no modern clinical research backing a mood effect for the tea. We're including this use because it's real, documented folklore, not because we're claiming the tea will change how you feel. Sometimes a warm drink and five quiet minutes do more than the herb itself.

5. The flowers themselves, in food

Borage isn't only a tea plant. Its star-shaped blue flowers have a mild cucumber flavor and show up scattered over salads, frozen into ice cubes for drinks, or used to decorate cakes at Andean celebrations. If you've ever grown borage in a garden, you already know bees can't stay away from it either. The plant's culinary and medicinal uses grew up side by side, which is fairly common with Andean herbs.

A caution worth taking seriously

Borage, especially the seed oil, naturally contains trace amounts of pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs), compounds that can stress the liver with heavy, prolonged use. Reputable suppliers select and process borage to keep PA levels low, but it's still smart to treat borage tea the way you'd treat any herbal remedy: as an occasional cup, not an all-day, every-day habit. A reasonable approach is one to two cups a day for a week or so around a cold, not a standing daily supplement for months on end. Skip it if you're pregnant or breastfeeding, have existing liver disease, or are giving it to young children, and check with a doctor before combining it with prescription medication, especially diuretics or blood pressure drugs since borage has a mild diuretic effect of its own. As always, we're not doctors, and this isn't medical advice.

For more everyday Peruvian teas, our full herbal tea collection is a good place to browse.

*These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Borage tea is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.