title_body: Can you make "herbal tea" out of beer brewing ingredients?
upvoted_answer: Whew! There are a lot of good questions in your question! To get the credentials out of the way, I'm a tea writer that owns a tea tavern and has done quite a bit of homebrewing (I've also made some tea beer, which may interest you).
  
  First, the only "official" ingredients of beer (if you follow the Reinheitsgebot, or Bavarian Purity Law) are barley, water, hops, and yeast. Similarly, "real" tea is made only from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, but "herbal" tea consists of pretty much any leaf, stem, root, seed, or flower you want to steep in water.
  
  With that covered, we can move on to common terminology, where beer can contain a variety of different grains, like malted and unmalted barley, wheat, oats, rye, and corn. I've even used more exotic grains like triticale in a homebrew. A lot of adjuncts are often added, too, ranging from honey to berries, juniper buds, and every imaginable spice.
  
  So, as to question 1: Yes, you can use beer brewing ingredients for making herbal teas. You'll want to blend them, though. Steeping straight hops doesn't make for a great drink. If you steep the hops for 3-5 minutes in boiling water, most of the aromatic oils will evaporate and most of the bittering agents won't have a chance to take effect. It's pretty meh. Blend hops with tea leaves or other herbs, though, and you can make an interesting drink.
  
  Question 2: Very little of the flavor of a typical beer develops in the keg. It develops during the boil and the primary/secondary fermentation steps. Once it hits the bottle (or keg), beer is ready to drink. You can certainly toss barley in boiling water and let it steep a while to make a drink, but without the fermentation process, it won't taste a whole lot like beer. That doesn't mean it won't be good — especially when blended with herbs — but it won't be beer.
  
  Question 3: Since you're using water to make both tea and beer, and yeast has no place in tea, you're really asking whether barley or hops makes a better tea. It depends on your personal taste. I'd probably say hops.
  
  And Question 4: I'll give you the same recommendation I'd give any homebrewer or tea lover: experiment. Hops are pretty cheap. Buy some (the flowers, not the pellets), get some teas with flavor bases you like, and play around. Malted barley is cheap enough that you can probably talk a homebrewer into giving you a couple of pounds, especially if you trade for a six-pack.
  
  Good luck, and let us know how your experiments turn out!