Iced Hierba Buena: A Spearmint Cooler for Peru's Summer

Ask anyone who grew up in a Peruvian kitchen what herb was always growing in a pot by the window, and a lot of them will say hierba buena. It is spearmint, more or less — the soft, round-leafed mint that goes into caldo de gallina, gets muddled into drinks, and shows up in a glass of warm tea whenever someone's stomach is off. In the summer, though, the smartest thing you can do with it is not drink it hot at all.

By early July the coast around Lima is muggy and the highland afternoons run warm, and a pot of boiling tea stops sounding appealing. Iced hierba buena fixes that. It is one of the cheapest, most refreshing things you can make with a handful of dried leaf, and it does not need sugar to taste good.

Hierba buena vs. the other mints

Quick clarification, because the names get muddled. Hierba buena is spearmint (Mentha spicata). It is milder and sweeter than peppermint, with less of that cold menthol punch. It is also a different plant from muña, the high-Andes "mint" that Peruvians reach for after a heavy meal — muña is its own genus and tastes sharper. If you want a summer cooler that is gentle and a little sweet on its own, spearmint is the one.

The cold-brew method (my preferred one)

Cold brewing sounds fussy but it is the opposite. You just trade heat for time.

Put about 2 tablespoons of dried hierba buena into a quart jar. Fill it with cold, filtered water. Cap it and leave it in the fridge for 6 to 8 hours, or overnight. Strain out the leaves in the morning and you have a full jar of pale-green, softly minty tea with no bitterness at all. Cold water pulls the bright aromatic oils and leaves behind the tannins that make hot tea turn harsh when it sits. Drink it over ice within two days.

The quick iced method

Short on time? Brew it hot and strong, then crash it cold. Steep 2 tablespoons of leaf in about 2 cups of just-boiled water for 5 minutes — covered, so the oils do not evaporate. Strain into a heatproof pitcher, then top with 2 cups of cold water and a tray of ice. Making it double-strength up front means the ice can melt without watering it down to nothing. A squeeze of lime and a couple of thin cucumber slices turn it into something you would happily serve guests.

What it does, and what it doesn't

Here is the honest part. Spearmint is a genuinely useful digestive herb — people have sipped mint tea after meals for centuries, and there is reasonable evidence that mint helps relax the gut and ease the feeling of a heavy stomach. There is also some early research suggesting spearmint may have mild effects related to hormones, but that work is preliminary and mostly small, and it is not a reason to drink a gallon of iced tea.

For summer, the real case for hierba buena is simpler and more honest: it is a hydrating, caffeine-free drink that actually tastes like something, so you reach for it instead of soda. That alone is worth the jar. If you want to build out a wider summer tea rotation, the rest of our herbal tea collection has plenty of caffeine-free options to cold-brew the same way.

A couple of cautions

Mint is famously easy on most people, but if you get frequent acid reflux, large amounts of mint can relax the valve at the top of the stomach and make heartburn worse — so go easy if that is you. Pregnant and breastfeeding women should keep spearmint to normal culinary and casual-tea amounts rather than drinking concentrated batches all day. Otherwise, it is about as gentle as an herb gets.

Grow a pot on the windowsill if you can. When you cannot, dried leaf cold-brews just as well, and a bag lasts most of the summer.

*These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Spearmint (Hierba Buena) is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.