New Mexico-Inspired Herbal Teas

“I’VE HAD A MASSIVE love affair with this state since I went to college in Santa Fe,” says Trevor Logan, who founded Desert Mountain Tea Company in 2022. After 30 years of running restaurants and pie shops in the Bay Area—including one famed for a green chile apple pie—Logan returned to New Mexico with a new vision: to translate the desert into the cup. Focusing on local botanicals—cota (also called Navajo tea), piñon, juniper, lavender, desert sage, rose hips—Logan sources through farmers’ markets, herbalists, and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. “My goal was to make sure that each blend featured at least one high desert, locally sourced ingredient,” he says. The result is evocative blends like Santa Fe Piñon, infused with pine needles, or Pecos River, steeped in juniper and honeybush. Madrid Magic, a lavender-mint tea with butterfly pea flower, brews blue before shifting to purple with a squeeze of lemon. And Biscochito manages to capture the state cookie’s anise-vanilla brightness in liquid form. “We’re all in fight or flight these days,” he says. “I want tea to create a ritual of calm. Let it take you to the mountains, the river, the desert, and back to yourself.” Logan says his “wildly earthy” blends are meant to smell and taste like the landscapes that inspired them. “When you steep them, you feel like you’re having a moment in nature—and I think nature is the one thing that can heal us.”