I was at some friends’ place a while ago and I saw this thing on their coffee table which looked like a tiny hookah, or a really fancy bong. It was made from an ornately-decorated gourd, with a thin metal shaft sticking out of it … upon closer inspection it looked like a metal spoon with a bunch of holes in it. I asked what it was, and they told me it was for yerba maté.
It’s this tea beverage that looks like bunch of green tobacco- dried, flat light-green leaves all ground up. You add hot water and directly to a cup almost entirely full of the leaves- then you sip the water with a special filtered straw called a bombilla (bom-bee-ya).
So back to the thing on the coffee table- did you guys just finish drinking some or something? No, it’s just there for decoration. “Yerba maté tastes like grass, I can’t stand it.”
At work I found this enormous sack of this stuff. To my surprise, we also had the paraphernalia (a small wood cup with the bombilla) in the cupboard. Whoda thought. One of my coworkers walked Anthony and me through the preparation and consumption of the stuff.
Anyway, they were right. It does taste like grass. Or straw maybe.
Incidentally, you don’t need this fancy stuff to drink yerba maté- it just looks cool and adds to the ritual.Something else that is really funny- some people online insist that yerba maté does not contain caffeine, instead containing the active ingredient “mateine.” I’m not sure what their motivation is; perhaps they think it’s less bad for you if you have this mateine in lieu of caffeine. Predictably, there is no distinct substance “mateine”- it’s the same stuff as caffeine. If it’s any consolation, in the early days of organic chemistry, people thought there was something called “teaine.” That is, the active ingredient in tea. Don’t get too excited; it was still caffeine.
There is a lot of opportunity to get yerba maté, in bay area grocery stores, or online if you live away from civilization- the most interesting one to me is Guayakí‘s Mate Chai Latté- it might have a milder flavor I can deal with. Although when it comes to that, what is the point?