This post is thanks to a comment from Zander Sturgill on other social media.
An interesting quotation attributed to Brigham Young that I had never seen before: “Some of the sisters and some of the brethren will say that tea and coffee is not mentioned in the Word of Wisdom, but hot drinks. As if this doesn’t refer directly, perfectly, absolutely, definitely and truly to that which we did drink hot. What does it allude to? What did we drink hot? Tea and coffee. When we made milk porridge, it was food. We couldn’t wash it down red hot the way we drank down tea. It alludes to tea and coffee or whatever we drank. I said to the Latter-day Saints at the annual conference of 6 April that the spirit whispers to me for this people to observe the Word of Wisdom. Let the tea and coffee and tobacco alone, whether they smoke, take snuff and chew, let it alone. Those that are in the habit of drinking liquor, cease to drink liquor.” Brigham Young Tooele in 1867 (Reported by Gerrit Dirkmaat on LDS Perspectives podcast, PhD in history in 2010 from the University of Colorado. He worked as a historian/writer for the Joseph Smith Papers Project (JSP) from 2010 to 2014. He was coeditor of Documents, Volume 1 and lead editor of Documents, Volume 3. He is now an assistant professor of Church history and doctrine at BYU)
What “tea” could BY be referring to in the 19th century? In those days, there really was only one kind of tea, and that was from the camellia sinensis plant, which produces black tea, green tea, white tea and yellow tea.
Teas that do not come from the camellia sinensis plant are presumably not part of the word of wisdom. For example, mint tea comes from a different plant, as does chamomile tea.
(This post is not intended to tell anybody else how they should practice the Word of Wisdom. That is between you and God.)