ASU professor uncovers history of South America’s most beloved caffeinated beverage

If you browse the energy drink aisle at any grocery store you’ll find a great variety of canned, caffeinated options, including an abundance of coffees, nitro cold brews and sugary carbonated beverages, that can help you feel awake or focused. But in recent years, you may have noticed something different on the shelf — yerba mate.

Julia Sarreal

Yerba mate is a caffeinated drink with Indigenous origins that is widely consumed in South America, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The bitter, herbal, tea-like beverage is brewed from the leaves of a native species of holly tree that can be found in the forests of South America.

Over the centuries, the drink’s popularity in Argentina faltered at times as coffee and tea took hold of the caffeinated beverage market. However, because of its unique qualities and distinctive flavor, the beverage has seen a resurgence since the 1980s. In fact, yerba mate is so popular that South American soccer players brought over 1,000 pounds of yerba mate with them to the World Cup in Qatar last year.

Arizona State University Associate Professor Julia Sarreal of the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies has dedicated years of her career studying and uncovering the origins, production and cultural significance of yerba mate. In her new book, “Yerba Mate: The Drink That Shaped a Nation,” Sarreal shares her findings on the evolution and storied history of the beverage. Here, she discusses her book and the story of South America’s favorite caffeinated beverage.

Question: How did this book come about and how did yerba mate become a topic of interest for you?

Answer: The roots of this project started in 1998 when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Paraguay — that was the first time I was exposed to yerba mate. Everyone drank it, and sharing it was critical to integrating into the community. All of the Peace Corps volunteers learned to drink it. My intellectual fascination with yerba mate was sparked several years later while living in Buenos Aires for doctoral research on a different topic. I was intrigued by the co-existence of yerba mate with the vibrant coffee culture in the city. After finishing my dissertation and turning it into a book, I turned to researching yerba mate.

Trained as a colonialist, I was originally going to do this project about yerba mate in the colonial time. But whenever I spoke with anybody, be it somebody in South America or be it somebody in the United States, and I told them I'm going to be working on yerba mate in the colonial period, they immediately would turn to the present day. So it became very apparent to me that I couldn't just study the colonial period; the evolution of yerba mate to the present day was really interesting to people.

Q: How would you describe yerba mate to those who have never tried or heard of it?

A: It's a caffeinated beverage that comes from the holly family — and it's a tree, not a plant like tea, but it's very similar to tea and coffee, especially with the caffeine; it's a stimulant. In South America, it is very closely tied to national identity. It's a symbol of being Argentine and being from this region of Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and southern Brazil. It's also a social practice in South America — the idea of sharing mate is really important. In South America, a gourd is typically filled with yerba mate, and there's the bombabilla, or special straw. Then you pass it around; it's a shared drink. 

About 10 or 15 years ago, the brand Guayakí came onto the scene in the United States. They started with tea bags, and then they moved to mate lattes and eventually got to the product we see today. … I like to think of it as a healthy energy drink. There's different iterations of yerba mate. There’s the traditional South American version, and then the canned and bottled energy drink is really big with college students, artists and musicians. They're completely different things.