South America’s most popular beverage, yerba mate, is now beloved around the world.
Football fans during the 2022 FIFA World Cup often saw the Argentine players traveling with dried hollowed-out calabash gourds in their hands, sipping yerba mate from silver straws called bombillas.
Yerba mate is the world’s third most popular naturally caffeinated drink, behind tea and coffee. According to reports, when the Argentine football team boarded their flights to Qatar for the World Cup, they carried 240kg of mate leaves with them. In Europe, another legendary footballer, Christiano Ronaldo, promotes the beverage wherever he goes.
“Yerba mate inspired the world’s first written tango lyrics, ‘tomá mate, che, tomá mate.’ It shows up widely in stories from Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay,” explains Dr. Christine Folch. “It is also very widely mentioned in the region's music.” Dr. Folch is a cultural anthropologist at Duke University who recently published The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History.
Made from the dried leaves and tender shoots of Ilex paraguarensis, yerba mate grows in the subtropical Atlantic forests in the heart of South America. In southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina, mate is the stimulating beverage of choice. Indigenous communities from the area, such as the Guaranis, brewed and consumed mate long before the colonists came along. Yerba is the direct Spanish translation of the Guarani word ka’a, meaning ‘plant’ or ‘herb’, while mate comes from the Quechua word mati for ‘cup’.
The Spanish were introduced to mate in the 1500s, about a hundred years before tea or coffee. The conquistadors and Jesuit missionaries spread the beverage far beyond the region where it was traditionally grown, all across the Viceroyalty of Peru, including the territories of present-day Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.
People migrating from those regions took mate with them. Today, Lebanon and Syria have become leading importers of yerba mate. In the North Atlantic, mate is blended into energy beverages and even packed into tea bags.
“Mate draws people together across time and space, from the chilly mornings of the Argentine countryside and the torrid afternoons in the Paraguayan Chaco to the souk of Damascus, the nightclubs of Berlin, the cafes of Krakow, and the rugged Pacific Northwest coastline,” says Dr. Folch.
With powerful psychoactive properties that affect the mind and the body, mate is not just another stimulating beverage. It has alkaloid caffeine along with significant amounts of theophylline (found in tea) and theobromine (found in chocolate). With tea and coffee containing more caffeine than yerba mate, the latter is considered a slightly less jittery stimulant, though its actual effect depends on how it is brewed. Traditionally, mate drinkers fill their gourds half to sometimes two-thirds full with dried yerba leaves and continue adding water throughout the day.
“Mate is dried by heat and smoked for a considerable amount of time,” Dr. Folch told STiR. “It has a smokey taste and the leaves will taste like green tea. Towards the North Atlantic, smoking of the leaves is not so popular, so there, the mate can taste quite herbal, like chamomile,” she adds.
Yerba mate is the beverage of South America. However, it is now also associated with the Levant in the Middle East and as a youthful energy drink in the North Atlantic. “Mate trains our eye to see new connections between markets and the meanings of psychoactive experiences,” says Dr. Folch.
In today’s world, where consumers choose to experiment with more than one stimulant throughout the day, perhaps having coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon, yerba mate is another stimulating option with a rich history and amazing stories to tell. The beverage has played a key role in South America's relatively newly independent nations' political, economic, cultural, and scientific developments. Throughout history, mate has brought people together and continues to do so even now, as it travels with its people across the globe.