Yerba Mate

Yerba mate is a caffeinated infusion brewed from the dried, roasted leaves of Ilex paraguariensis, an evergreen holly relative native to the Parana River basin. The dried leaf is packed into a hollowed gourd, also called a mate, covered with hot water, and drunk through a metal straw called a bombilla with a strainer at its submerged end. Guarani and neighboring Kaingang peoples used the plant as a stimulant and social drink before European contact, and Spanish colonists and criollos adopted it after encountering the Guarani in the sixteenth century, with Jesuit missions cultivating it commercially by the seventeenth century. The same gourd of yerba is refilled with hot water many times over a sitting and is typically shared, one gourd and one straw, around a circle of drinkers.