Sacred Origins: Eisa Tea Co. and the Kichwa Legacy of Guayábana, Muña, and Cedrón

What began as a short stay arranged through Couchsurfing became one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

I travelled to Peru’s Sacred Valley expecting to stay with Mila, a Kichwa healer, for only a few days. Instead, I stayed for weeks.

From the beginning, she treated me less like a guest and more like family. Every morning we cooked together, collected herbs, drank tea late into the evening, and slowly built a rhythm of life around the mountains. She taught me about herbal medicine through everyday practice: which plants were brewed after meals, which leaves soothed the lungs, which infusions were prepared for anxiety, altitude, exhaustion, or grief. Between cups of tea (technically tisanes) and long walks through the valley, she also began teaching me basic Kichwa phrases. Before long, she had started calling me hijita - “little daughter” - something she still says every time we speak.

Mila grew many of the herbs herself around her home, drying bunches from the ceiling beams and preparing infusions with the kind of instinct that comes only from generations of inherited knowledge.

The three herbs that stayed with me most deeply were muña, cedrón, and guanábana. Together, they became the foundation of Eisa Tea Co.’s Sacred Valley herbal trilogy - a collection rooted not only in flavour, but in reciprocity, memory, and the traditions Mila shared with me.

Muña: The Mountain Herb of the Andes

Muña (Minthostachys mollis), often called Andean mint, grows wild across the highlands of Peru and Bolivia. The first time I drank it, I had just returned from walking through the Sacred Valley at altitude, exhausted and half-frozen from the evening air. Mila handed me a steaming enamel cup of muña tea, sharp with mint and wild herbs, and within minutes I understood why the plant has remained central to Andean life for centuries.

In the Andes, muña is far more than simply a beverage. Communities have traditionally used it to warm the body, aid digestion, support breathing, and ease the effects of altitude. Travellers drink it after long mountain journeys; farmers sip it before dawn; market vendors carry thermoses of it through cold mornings in Cusco and the Sacred Valley.

Historically, muña’s role stretched far beyond the teacup. Leaves were layered between potatoes to help preserve harvests, bundles were hung in homes to deter insects, and shepherds carried it through mountain passes, and its intensely aromatic oils became part of the sensory landscape of the Andes itself.

Its flavour reflects its environment: vivid, cooling, medicinal, almost impossibly fresh. In this collection, muña brings brightness, clarity, and the feeling of cold mountain air after rain.

Cedrón: Citrus Calm and Evening Ritual

If muña belongs to the mountains, cedrón belongs to the evening. Cedrón (Aloysia citrodora), also known as lemon verbena, was one of the herbs Mila prepared most often. After meals, during conversations, before bed, there always seemed to be a steaming pot somewhere nearby. The scent filled the kitchen each night: soft citrus, warm herbs, wood smoke, and cold mountain air drifting through the windows.

Across Peru and wider South America, cedrón has traditionally been used to calm digestion and quiet the nervous system. Families brew it for bloating, nausea, stress, and sleeplessness. In the Sacred Valley especially, it carries a feeling of domestic comfort, the tea someone makes for you instinctively when you look tired (Mila made it for me a lot!).

Modern herbal research echoes much of this traditional knowledge. Lemon verbena contains aromatic compounds such as citral and linalool, both associated with calming effects.

Cedrón feels gentle in a way many herbal teas are not: bright but soft, restorative without heaviness. It quickly became the emotional centre of this collection.

Guanábana: Restorative Leaves from the Tropical Forest

The third herb, guanábana, comes from an entirely diffe

rent landscape. Harvested from the soursop tree (Annona muricata), guanábana leaves are larger, broader, and earthier than the other herbs in this collection. Brewed slowly, they create a smooth infusion with soft vegetal notes and a grounding bitterness.

Across parts of Peru and the wider Amazonian world, guanábana leaf tea is associated with rest, recuperation, and sustained energy. While uses vary between communities and families, it is often prepared as a restorative infusion after long days of physical labour or emotional exhaustion.

Mila once described it to me as a plant that “returns the body to itself.” That idea stayed with me deeply. In a world obsessed with stimulation and productivity, guanábana feels deliberately slower.

Visually, the leaves transform the collection too. Compared to the delicate cedrón and fine-cut muña, guanábana appears almost sculptural in the tins: broad folded leaves carrying the humid memory of tropical forests into the dry air of the Andes.

Tea, Reciprocity, and One Very Important Llama

As this collection developed, I knew it could not simply become another story about “discovering” herbs abroad and repackaging them elsewhere stripped of context. Everything meaningful about these teas came from relationship, generosity, and trust.

Mila shared not only plants with me, but language, stories, traditions, family meals, and ways of understanding the natural world that have been carried through generations of Kichwa life. That knowledge belongs to living communities, not aesthetics.

For that reason, 50% of profits from the Sacred Valley trilogy go directly back to Mila and her family. More specifically: I am trying to buy them a llama. This began half-jokingly during one of our conversations, but quickly became serious.

In the Andes, llamas remain deeply important animals, for carrying goods, wool, farming life, and economic stability. Mila explained how valuable another llama would be for the family, and now every sale of these teas contributes toward that goal.

So somewhere between a Couchsurfing stay, a mountain kitchen in Peru, and a Welsh tea company now exists a very real llama fund.

Honestly, I cannot imagine a better ending for this story.

Living Plant Traditions

What Mila taught me is that herbal traditions survive not because they are frozen in history, but because they continue to live within everyday acts of care.

Muña, cedrón, and guanábana are not relics of the past, but are still brewed daily in homes across Peru. They are still, as I was able to witness, shared between generations in kitchens filled with steam and conversation.

The Sacred Origins collection exists because of those living traditions.

Every cup carries a small part of that story: the mountains, the plants, Mila’s kitchen, and perhaps, eventually, one very happy llama grazing somewhere in the Sacred Valley.