What Is Borage Tea (Borraja)? A Peruvian Cold Remedy

July 12, 2026

Ask an older vendor at a Lima mercado for something to head off a cold, and there's a decent chance she'll hand you a bag of borraja before anything else. Borage isn't originally Peruvian. It arrived from the Mediterranean generations ago, brought over during the colonial period, and settled so completely into Andean and coastal herbal practice that most people who drink it today have no idea it wasn't always here.

We started carrying loose leaf borage tea because customers kept asking for it by name, usually the same way: "the one for cuando te va a dar gripe," when a cold is about to hit. That's the plant's main reputation in Peruvian households. It's not marketed as a cure-all. It's the thing you drink when you feel a fever coming on and want to sweat it out before it gets worse.

What borage actually is

The plant has an odd footnote in European folklore worth mentioning: medieval herbalists linked borage with courage, to the point that Roman soldiers reportedly drank borage wine before battle. That association followed the plant across the Atlantic in a loose, half-remembered way, though in Peru today nobody's drinking borraja tea to steel their nerves. It's strictly a household cold remedy here, not a courage tonic.

Borago officinalis is a fuzzy-leafed plant with small star-shaped blue flowers, originally from the Mediterranean basin. In Peru it's grown at mid-elevations and sold dried, either as loose leaf or bundled fresh in produce markets. The tea brews up mild, slightly cucumber-like in flavor, nothing bitter or medicinal-tasting, which is part of why it's an easy sell to people who don't usually like herbal tea.

Traditionally, Peruvian households use borraja tea three ways: as a diaphoretic, something that makes you sweat, during a fever or the first day of a cold, as a mild expectorant for a chesty cough, and, less commonly now, as something given to children with measles to help the rash come out fully, an old-world practice that traveled here with the plant itself.

What the research actually says

Here's where we have to be honest: almost all of the clinical research on borage is about borage seed oil, not the leaf tea. Borage seed oil is rich in gamma-linolenic acid (GLA), an omega-6 fatty acid that's been studied for skin conditions like eczema and for rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. That's a completely different product from the tea you'd brew from dried leaves, and the research doesn't transfer over.

The tea's traditional uses for fever, cough, and cold symptoms come from generations of folk use, not clinical trials. We haven't found solid human studies on brewed borage leaf tea specifically for any of these. That doesn't mean it doesn't do anything. It means we can't point you to a study and say this is why it works. If you're drinking it, you're drinking it because it's part of a tradition that's worked well enough for people to keep doing it, not because a lab has confirmed the mechanism.

An important caution most people don't hear

Borage leaves and flowers naturally contain small amounts of pyrrolizidine alkaloids, compounds that in large or prolonged doses have been linked to liver damage. This isn't a reason to panic over an occasional cup, but it is a reason to treat borage tea the way you'd treat any herb with this profile: something for short stretches, not a daily habit for months on end. We source from growers who harvest and dry the leaf carefully, but pyrrolizidine alkaloid content in raw dried herbs isn't something that gets verified batch by batch the way it would be in a pharmaceutical extract.

Skip borage tea if you're pregnant or breastfeeding, and check with a doctor first if you have any liver condition. If you're on blood pressure medication, mention it to your pharmacist too. Borage has a mild reputation for affecting blood pressure, and there isn't enough data to say confidently how it interacts with common medications.

How people actually drink it

Steep about a teaspoon of the dried leaf in hot water for 5 to 7 minutes. It's mild enough that oversteeping doesn't really ruin it, unlike more bitter herbs. Some households add a bit of honey and lemon when it's for a cold, turning it into something closer to a hot toddy without the alcohol. Others drink it plain, once or twice during the day a cold symptom shows up, not as a standing daily routine.

If cooling, calming teas are more your focus than cold-and-fever support, our herbal tea collection has options like chamomile and lemon balm that are better studied for that specific use. And if you're looking for something built specifically around immune support during cold season, cat's claw tea has more research behind it for that purpose than borage does.

Borage is a good example of a plant that earns its place through generations of household use rather than a stack of clinical papers. We think that's worth knowing going in, both what it's good for and what we genuinely don't know yet.