Ashwagandha
The root of a small nightshade of dry India, powdered and stirred into warm milk in Indian households and now among the most heavily traded botanicals in the world. The Sanskrit name means “smell of a horse”, and it is a description of the fresh root rather than a metaphor.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Withania somnifera
- Family
- Solanaceae
- Part used
- Root
- Origin
- Dry regions of India, the Middle East and parts of Africa; commercially grown in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat
- Drunk in
- Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, India
Character
Strongly bitter, earthy and unmistakably horsey, with a long astringent finish. Milk, sugar and ghee are near-universal in the Indian preparation because the root is very hard going without them.
Notes: horse, hay, earth, bitter root
History
A long-standing item of Ayurvedic materia medica whose modern trade bears almost no relation to its historical scale. Indian cultivation expanded substantially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to meet export demand, and the international market for extracts is now far larger than domestic Indian household use has ever been.
How it is drunk
In India the powdered root is stirred into warm milk with sugar or ghee and taken as a churna — a domestic preparation rather than a brewed infusion, and a spooned one rather than a steeped one. Outside India it is sold as capsules and standardised extracts, and as a powder for latte-style milk drinks in cafés.
Production
Roots are lifted in winter, washed, cut and dried, and graded on thickness and on whether the material is root only. Adulteration with stem and leaf is a recognised trade problem and root-only material is priced accordingly; root powder, root extract and whole-plant extract are three different commodities sold under one name.
Preparation
Steeped with milk · Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 15 min
What gets confused
“Indian ginseng” is a trade name and nothing more: Withania is a nightshade and Panax is an araliad, and TeaHQ holds ginseng separately. “Winter cherry” is also used for Physalis species, which are a different genus in the same family.
Common mistakes
- Steeping it like a leaf. It is a hard root and needs simmering or stirring into something.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. 132 of the 204 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Ashwagandha is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.