itch.io

Here's my ingredient substitution list, if anyone is interested. I was leaning toward ingredients I like in tea, rather than trying to match the visual characteristics of the original ingredients. Some of the original ingredients are available as medicinal herbs, sometimes with cautions about use. Others, like Birds Nest Fungi, aren't used in tea as far as I can tell, and are non-toxic, but I thought it would be more interesting to substitute something tasty. The labels on the bottles have the ingredient name in quotes if it's a substitution, and I wrote the actual ingredient name on the bottom of each bottle.

Other ingredients that I considered, but didn't use in this set included granulated honey, cornflower petals, cardamom pods (often used in chai masala), lemon balm, vanilla bean, cloves, and fennel seed. I could also have included more different kinds of tea (unflavored leaves from Camellia sinensis), e.g. oolong, Darjeeling, white tea, etc. Some ingredients are usually combined with other ingredients, e.g. several spices with black tea to make chai masala, rather than being served alone, but I think all of these ingredients could work alone as a drinkable tea.