A Forgotten Drink That Caffeinated North America for Centuries | Hacker News Reader

A Forgotten Drink That Caffeinated North America for Centuries

atlasobscura.com

286 pointsDoreenMichele164 comments

This reminds me of the paw paw (not to be confused with the papaya which Australians call pawpaw) https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/15/550985844/th... It's a fruit that seems tropical, a close relative of the custard apple or sitaphal that tastes like a pina colada. Yet it grows natively all over the eastern US. It's so common that in many places it's every third tree in the forest.

I grew up in peak pawpaw country (Cincinnati), got a thorough outdoors education via boy scouts, and never learned about the existence of this incredible plant. Nobody knows about it! The day after I learned about it, I could walk a few feet into the woods in a park in the middle of the city, shake a tree and come out with tropical tasting fruit, and yet people walk by this tree every day oblivious. Mind-boggling.

Pawpaw is available in every supermarket in Australia, maybe not all year round.

I’ve seen quite a few pawpaw trees in backyards, but it’s defi an under appreciated fruit here too.

Dried sugar dusted pawpaw is flipping amazing.

I loved dried pawpaw as a kid (growing up in Aus) but never had it fresh. Is it good?

Hard to beat sugar dusted sweetness, but yeah the fresh fruit is delicious too.

That's a totally different pawpaw! The fruit that Australians call pawpaw, Americans call papaya. Edited original post to avoid confusion

Nah mate, same thing.

The Google image search you linked to is the pawpaw or papaya, it goes under both name.

See here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaya

I should know better since I work for Google, but you're getting results localized for Australia which are all "papaya." I get results localized for the US which are all this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba

The funny thing is that I've actually used this example at work as a rare case of an Australia/US localization issue, but totally forgot about HNs global audience when I made this post.

Ooooh, right, I see, thanks for clearing that up.

Yep, I see now how the flesh and seeds are similar to a Custard Apple. I’ve eaten those fresh from the farm in Norther New South Whales and liked them. Had limited success with store bought ones elsewhere in Australia.

Funny how we both forgot about internet search localisation!

This right here is why I've dumped Google. Long tail searches essentially no longer work, if I type a part number into Google it'll often be rewritten needlessly and I'll get irrelevant results.

Even Yahoo can get long tail search right, which is a pretty low bar. Though, Qwant seems to be the most well rounded search engine, both Yahoo and DuckDuckGo have unpolished edge cases that have turned me off over the years.

If you can remember the example queries I can pass them along to debug. (You can check your search history if you have it turned on. https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity )

Already passed them along a few weeks back when I was over in Fremont (a neighborhood in Seattle) at the Google Campus. Not expecting much, most of my friends who worked at Google have moved on to greener pastures.

Papaya does make for good ointment cream for massaging post op scarring. :)

From the Wikipedia article you linked to:

"The name Pawpaw or Papaw, first recorded in print in English in 1598,[8] originally meant the giant herb Carica papaya or its fruit (as it still commonly does in many English-speaking communities, including Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). According to Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary, it began to be used [presumably in North America] "from 1760 to designate the papaw tree" [meaning not Carica papaya but Asimina triloba]."

So the original pawpaw is papaya, and the American pawpaw is the imposter.

I LOVE paw paws. I used to eat them all the time as a kid when I’d visit Kentucky. You can buy saplings online, but I’ve never had any success growing them in my area.

They're pollinated by blow flies, not by the insects that pollinate most other plants. Which is why it's sometimes recommended to hang small animal carcasses (rabbits, rats) between paw paw plants. For those of us who aren't too keen on nailing up dead animals, there's manual pollination.

Clover Food Lab here in Boston got a small batch of pawpaws recently and used them to make soda. It was heavenly.

Hopefully recent trends of farmers' markets and such will increase the availability!

Pawpaws have very inconsistent harvests, don't ship well at all, and have a very short ready to eat -> overripe time.

They are also, like you note, absolutely delicious. I have two trees in my backyard. (You need two for them to pollinate and bear fruit.) But there are practical reasons why you don't see them for sale very often.

I get why they aren't in supermarkets but it's so sad that they've dropped out of food culture almost entirely. They're so abundant in the woods around Cincinnati that they are hard to miss. I remember seeing one on the ground while camping as a kid, but had no idea what it was and neither did anyone around me.

Make sure to do your part, and introduce as many people as you can! They're still very uncommon here in California, but they grow well in much of the state. I managed to get one of my neighbors to plant a pair a few years back. This year may be the first we both get fruit. :)

Are you in a wetter area? I mentally associate them with river valleys so naively I wouldn't think they'd be drought tolerant at all.

I'm in the bay area of California, so while we do get rain, it's highly seasonal. My pawpaws do need watering in the summer, but it isn't as bad as you might think. They have a pretty deep taproot once established, so a slow drip system just to keep the soil column from drying out can be all you need, which is pretty water-efficient. I'd say they use about as much water as an equivalent-sized stonefruit tree, like a peach or plum, maybe even a little less.

This should make them even more attractive as DIY foraging or backyard arboriculture.

A fruit that is delicious and exotic, but doesn't lend to industrial/agricultural production & marketing. That's kind of what truffles and morels are.

It definitely does: here in the DC area you’ll hear and see pawpaws from people’s foraging spots which are in public locations and are carefully never discussed in detail.

Couldn't they be canned to overcome these instabilities? It would reduce flavour, I'm sure, but still

It would be like canning a pudding. They're quite mushy when ready to eat.

Which may work out just fine! I've never tried, simply because there are never any leftover pawpaws in my house. :D

There are a number of active PawPaw breeding programs working to improve the fruit's production, size, and suitability for shipping. Some of the named varieties are even more incredible tasting than the standard wild ones.

Kentucky State:

http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/

http://kysu.edu/academics/cafsss/pawpaw/

http://ppserver.pawpaw.kysu.edu/KSUstory.htm

Purdue:

https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/nexus/Asimina_triloba_ne...

(I grew up around the trees and my father now grows and sells Pawpaw trees commercially.)

That makes me very happy to hear, and I wish your father the best of luck in making our native fruit better known.

Does he sell to individuals? Or if not, do you know of a nursery where I could buy one of the improved cultivars? I wouldn't mind planting one or two more. :)

Thanks!

He does. Here's his site: http://blossomnursery.com/ I'm not sure if it's the right time of year for transplanting, but he should be able to tell you if you contact him.

Thanks for the link! It looks like web ordering isn't working, but I see contact info, so I'm going to give it a shot. Some great pics, too. Cheers!

I ate a paw paw once, and since then I've been trying to find a definitely identified paw paw tree so I can recognize them in the wild. The fruit was so delicious and the seeds were really interesting and unique. If any of you are willing to show me a paw paw tree in person, please shoot me an email.

It's 1am where I live right now, but tomorrow I'll take a picture of the two in my backyard and post it. They're only just starting to leaf out after winter, but you can get a decent idea of what they look like.

Thanks for the offer, but there's more to identifying plants for me than what they look like. There's also texture, and smell. I've looked at pictures online, and it's tricky, because apparently their morphology changes depending on where they are grown.

Here are a variety of pictures to give you an idea of the range of morphology:

http://blossomnursery.com/

http://blossomnursery.com/pawpaw_PIX.html

http://blossomnursery.com/pawpaw_more_pix.htm

Just go to your local botanical garden or arboretum. They’re super easy to recognize because the leaves look like giant exclamation marks. Sometimes you’ll see them planted near magnolia trees or Buckeyes, both of which also have big leaves, to ‘hide’ them so that people don’t eat the fruit.

I'd love to see (and taste) one too!

South Africans also call papaya pawpaw. Wikipedia says the name is colour related:in Australia, these are called "red papaya" and "yellow papaw". In SA I only saw yellow.

Sadly, that whole genus contains neurotoxins. I'm not sure the medical evidence is in on pawpaw's, but soursop is responsible for high rates of atypical Parkinson's in areas where it's a staple.

Looks like you're right:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22130466/

I'm guessing moderate pawpaw consumption is still relatively safe. This study isolated annnonacin from pawpaws and applied it to neural cells directly in large dosages. The soursop case involved prolonged and daily intake, as well.

The toxins are mostly in the leaves, bark, and skins, so eating them is quite safe.

Some people can have an allergic reaction when consuming them so just be aware of that when trying them for the first few times.

According to the linked article, the toxin is in the fruit pulp. I wonder if it could be bred out?

There's only a small amount in the pulp. Not an issue unless you totally gorge on them. (Similar to the Cyanide in Almonds.)

The active components have been studied for treatment of a variety of things - anti-tumor and pesticide uses being big ones:

http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/Pawpaw%20Acetogenins.htm

Unfortunately, it's hard to get funding to work on directly plant-derived compounds since companies can't get a monopoly on the resulting treatments.

Come to southeast Ohio and you will see that pawpaws are far from forgotten. Bumper stickers on cars are common and there's even a Pawpaw Festival each September.

https://www.ohiopawpawfest.com/

Lots of people I know in Kentucky eat them as well.

So much so that Kentucky State has a large program devoted to them:

http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/

I just learned about these last year from a coworker. I still have a way too old one in a ziploc bag in the fridge, because I was suppose to try and grow a seedling.

Are these like sapotes? My grandma has a Sapote tree in San Diego and it is incredible!

In that they have a tender, thin green skin and creamy white flesh. The flavor profile is pretty different though.

Pawpaw has been described as tasting like banana custard.

They area related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherimoya

(And yes, Sapotes are amazing too - one of my favorite fruit.)

Hey we've got some pawpaws too! Ours are flowering and already setting some fruit!

Go nearly anywhere in Argentina and you will find mate. People walk around with a thermos of hot water and sip all day. It is a shared cultural experience too like saying hello. You see a friend, greet them, then offer them some mate.

Our SF-based company has an office in Mendoza, Argentina. You will not find baristas and coffee (though Starbucks just opened there), but plenty of mate for everyone. Due to this connection, we have plenty of supplies for mate in the office, but it is still not as commonly adopted here as coffee.

Very interesting. I drank mate with friends from Buenos Aires when I was a teen. We would drink it the traditional way, namely out of a small dried gourd with a metal straw. Are you saying that mate (pronounced mah-teh like a southerner saying "my tea" fwiw -- not an Australian addressing a friend) is not commercialized in Argentina? As in, people offer their personal mate and there are not "mate shops" that would equate to "coffee shops"(think third wave USA)? Or that they prefer Mate to coffee, hence there are no "coffee shops" while there may or may not be "mate shops"?

I guess I like the idea that mate is so personal than you wouldn't go to a commercial shop for their blendbut ratherwould share your homebrew with a friend on a park bench.

Having lived in Argentina, I can confirm that this is indeed the case! There is also a version called terere in which cold fruit juice is substituted for hot water.

Mendocino here (live in the US but visit Mendoza every few years). There are plenty of places one can go for coffee, but American-style coffee shops are not nearly as popular. Mate shops aren't a thing, but it isn't homebrew in the sense that people don't grow their favorite varieties of yerba mate plants in the back yard. You get a bag of yerba at the supermarket, have a thermos with hot water, and a gourd & bombilla. People drink it with friends, but, like coffee, it's also something they drink throughout the day by themselves while working, studying, etc.

> something they drink throughout the day

Do people there consider the downsides of using stimulants all day long?

Not that most people elsewhere give it any thought, I'm just curious.

Is there anything akinto different flavours? Or brand differences?

Is it like people and cigarettes? Like Brand X is your brand ornate and you'd rather die than have to drink brand Y?

Is there such a thing like a sommelier for mate? Maybe like wine: "I detect notes of lavender...."

This is incredibly interesting!

But what about Yaupon tea, the subject of the article?

One thing I've always wondered is, if everyone is sharing a straw, does that lead to issues with disease transmission? Seems like it would be very easy to spread a cold around or something worse.

saliva + hot liquid are pretty good disinfectants, especially if only dry lips are used..

related side note: most (all?) eastern christian groups use a single spoon for communion..

my unscientific biological theory on these things is they to some extent cause immune-boosting results since you are getting a micro exposure to mostly killed off or weakened pathogens in combination with 'clean' nutrients (mate+vitamins or host) and potentially also antibodies from the others in the group..

I tried Club Mate once, a popular drink in Germany, but it gave me headache. I suspect this is due to the Theobromine content.

"Mate", not "maté". I guess it's cool to add random accents to foreign words to make them look more exotic, but this changes the pronunciation of the word and in fact turns into a different one.

"Mate" refers to "yerba mate" (as in the article) or even the gourd used to consume it; it's also a common abbreviation of "jaque mate", "checkmate". "Maté", on the other hand, means "I killed".

For what it's worth, Wikipedia includes this explanation:

> "In English, "mate" is occasionally written "maté", to distinguish it from other meanings of the word mate, although this spelling is not used in Spanish or Portuguese."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerba_mate

A similar example is "résumé", so as to not be confused with "resume".

Going further down the Wikipedia hole, here's a page describing use of diacritics in English, which includes a subsection on "Accent-addition and accent-removal":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

“résumé” is not really a similar example, because that is the actual spelling of the word in French. Edit: but according to your link sometimes only the latter accent is kept in English.

Yeah, it varies depending on your dictionary or stylebook. For example, MW lists:

> "résumé ... variants: or resume or less commonly resumé"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resume

"résumé" (with accents) is a french word that means summary.

Yes, and the origin is that a résumé was a summary of your curriculum vitae, listing only the most recent/relevant parts whereas the CV was complete list of your 'life course' including all your work history, accomplishments and accreditations, no matter how long that may be.

Now, at least in industry in North America, the CV has largely disappeared. It still exists in academia and in Europe the term exists but the content is usually abbreviated like a resume.

Actually, European CVs are usually shorter than American résumés :)

I've also seen sake (the Japanese beverage) spelled as saké, presumably to distinguish it from the English word "sake."

Usually you can infer the meaning of the word from its context, but the accent gives English speakers a better idea of how to pronounce it.

Reading this directly reminded me of a great poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité (or is it Trenite? ;):

http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

Can't think of many non-constructed phrases where the meaning of "mate" would be ambiguous. "Drinking mate with my mates" (as many a hipster tech Londoner do in the startup scene :P). "I'm drinking my mate" should never be confusing outside of liquid cannibal circles!

The accent isn't there to make it look exotic, it's there to clarify the pronunciation. English steals é from French, not Spanish. Without the accent it wouldn't be obvious that it's supposed to be an ae diphthong. (Obviously it's still non-obvious, but it's a reasonable spelling.)

Hmm. Makes sense, but I'm not convinced. Borrowing an é from French also doesn't give you the correct pronunciation, since the French and the Spanish é sound different (and since Spanish does have an accented e, it makes the whole thing more confusing!). It's MAT-eh, not mat-AY. And now I feel a bit like Hermione Granger :(

It gives you the correct English pronunciation. The point isn't to make a perfect phonentic alphabet, it's to distinguish between the English word "mate" and the Spanish loan-word "maté" which have different pronunciations. And I don't think the distinction between eh and ay as you've laid out is very meaningful to a native English speaker. Depending on where you are those may be pronounced exactly the same.

I love both coffee and tea. Both caffeine drinks yet they taste nothing like one another. If it's a drink to have with food it has to be tea. For a waker upper it's coffee. At other times it's a toss up. I'd love to try this cassina be a while before we see it in Europe I'd imagine

> I'd love to try this cassina be a while before we see it in Europe I'd imagine

Since it's a dried leaf similar to tea or mate you can probably get it shipped from the US, though I expect the postage will be somewhat expensive.

Look for "yaupon" or "yaupon tea" as, as the article notes that's how it's called/marketed these days.

Thanks I just found a UK site selling it https://www.ancientpurity.com/yaupon-tea-green-leaf-113g-loo...

Not cheap though but it's just for curiousity sake

Bookmarked! Thanks very much :)

Or try ours. We harvest our own. That company resells someone elses ;)

https://lostpinesyaupontea.com

Fair dues to you for finding this thread, you guys are on the ball

Actually I came across your (very nice) site first but you don't ship outside N. America unfortunately.

Thanks for the compliment. We do ship outside of N. America and you should have been able to select that as an option. I'm going to have to go take a look see.. I just sent a package to Denmark and Germany.

Fair enough, then I think you need to change the text on your shipping & Returns tab.

my routine is coffee in the morning and tea in the evening.

There's a small company in Texas that sells it. Maybe they'll ship to Europe. https://www.catspringtea.com/

Another obscure-ish tea that is seems to be gaining popularity is guayusa (mostly being pushed under the brand Runa). It is another holly from warm regions, I think from rainforests in South America. I'm a big fan of the moderate caffeine content and the ability to steep it for long periods to get more caffeine out of it, without it getting bitter. It is amazing as a summer/warm weather high-caffeine iced tea. You can buy in loose tea form by the pound from Amazon for about $20.

Guayusa is great. We're pretty jealous of the size of their leaves compared to yaupon leaves. Yaupon, guayusa and yerba mate are all in the Ilex genus, they're the three known caffeinated hollies (or more accurately the three known hollies with appreciable levels of caffeine)

Hey, you guys are in Austin right? Is your Chote Ave location a store? If so, I'm planning to stop by later today to buy some yaupon. :)

Naw, that's our house. Sure seems to help with SEO though! Our yaupon is in the Wheatsville Co-op on Guadalupe near campus, and the S. Lamar store. We also do four farmers markets on the weekends (Downtown, HOPE, Mueller and Lakeline)

The other day a barista offered me a tea made from the berries/cherries that coffee beans grow inside. It was delicious, but so caffeinated that I felt like I was on drugs all afternoon.

I have tried youpon tea at a cafe before and even purchased it here: https://lostpinesyaupontea.com. I like Yerba Mate quite well, so I wouldn’t say youpon in better, but I would say I like it equally well. It’s definitely worth a try.

How does it taste?

It tastes a lot like an earthy, grassy tea (Camellia sinensis). It's pretty good.

Ordered, thanks!

Do you prefer the light or the dark roast?

These people are great - I have ordered a bunch of yaupon from them, both light and dark. The light roast is more of a green tea flavor, while the dark roast is closer to a black tea or even coffee. The best part about yaupon is the buzz, though. It's a strong boost like coffee but without the jitters and crash that coffee can cause. It's a more lucid, feel-good stimulant with a flavor that's hard to describe. Much less bitter than coffee or even tea, it has an earthy, smokey taste that resembles yerba mate a little bit but resists easy classification. Highly recommended.

Many thanks! It's nice to stumble into a love fest :)

I ordered some as well. I bet they'll wonder what caused a spike in orders today.

Just figured it out ;) Almost 30 orders so far as of last night. Thanks y'all!

What is the net weight of a package? (And why isn't it on the packaging?)

It is on the actual packaging. But, it's not on the photo of the packaging on our website because we used one photo and then you can select whatever size you want. All the packages look exactly the same except the variation in size. We need to update the photos. There are 1oz, 2oz, 4oz and 8oz loose leaf. The tea bags are 20 tea bags and it's 1oz of yaupon.

Woohoo! We're famous :) Hey thanks for posting the link to our site. We've gotten a lot of orders from here. You rock.

Thanks for making a great product!

First line of the article: Yaupon tea, a botanical cousin to yerba maté, is now almost unknown.

and the one line about its taste: "people [prefer] it over maté in a blind taste test" (but it's similar)

A few months ago, I was in Austin and met two youpon cold brew makers selling at the farmers markets. Really delicious and smooth. The plant grew wild on many of the hikes I took.

Do you recall which market you went to? I’m curious to try some.

He's talking about Local Leaf. They're at the Mueller Farmers Market on Sundays from 10am-2pm. They're super nice and chatty. They cold brew theres to the caffeine strength of coffee. Come check us out too, Lost Pines Yaupon Tea (http://lostpinesyaupontea.com), we're also at that market. We also do the Downtown (sat 9-1), Lakeline (sat 9-1) and HOPE (sun 11-3) markets. We sell loose leaf, tea bags and brewed tea. Ours is pretty different than Local Leaf. It's closer to green tea in caffeine and tastes a lot like (delicious) iced tea.

I never thought I'd see a vendor of Yaupon at my regular farmer's market(HOPE) on HN!

I'm in the EU, it would be 35€ or something to get a bit of this :)

i tried yerba mate in an an automatic drip coffee maker with some cream and sugar and i was blown away by the energy i got from it. there was no caffeine crash. it was a sustained energy. it takes a while to kick in so u gotta drink it first thing in morning. u can find some popular bags of it on amazon. it has to be the loose leaf stuff, not the individual bags. i think i tried Taragui Yerba Mate Con Palo. but there are other brands that are just as good.

i spent a while in argentina and they drink it down there with the gourds. it's interesting. we would be in a meeting and someone would start passing around a gourd and each person would drink from the same gourd during a business meeting. that person would refill it with hot water from a thermos and pass it to the next guy.

Yerba mate[0] has 2 stimulants aside from caffeine: theophylline and theobromine. Perhaps they interact in such a way as to stabilize the effect of the caffeine.

[0] http://nativayerbamate.com/health.html (Nativa sells yerba mate so possible bias)

I tried Mate once in the form of Club Mate, a popular alternative drink in Germany. It triggered migraine headache, so i wont drink it again. I just looked up Theobromine on Wikipedia which states that high dosis may cause headache. I think this is an explanation for why i got headaches from it.

How much milk and sugar did you add?

a tbsp (or so) of 1/2 and 1/2 and a teaspoon of sugar

Holy crap, they are right! The OED does mistakenly define yaupon as having emetic properties!

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/yaupon

How does one get the OED fix such an obvious error?

I imagine you just have to tell them about it.

That should be the case, if they are actually as serious as they act.

That’s not the OED, though. There are multiple dictionaries using the Oxford name.

It's just a little outdated; that used to be the main use of the plant. Now people have found you can "microdose" it for different effects from profuse vomiting.

The article says that numerous studies show it doesn’t do this.

Texas company that sells it: https://www.catspringtea.com/

this is the one I always buy at farmers markets in Austin https://lostpinesyaupontea.com/

This Maine company recently started selling Yaupon. No affiliation. https://www.surthrival.com/products/yaupon-tea

I bought some from a random site[1] that turned up when I searched duckduckgo for "cassina tea" because Amazon didn't return any results for cassina. Lots for yaupon, but that came farther down the article.

[1]https://wildsouthtea.com/pages/about-cassina

Postum[1] might be the opposite. Coffee for Mormons that didn't want to break the rules. I tried it, and it was awful. But ask any Mormon you know, and they usually at least know what it is.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postum

You might like roasted barley. It's not awesome, but it's not bad, either.

Oh, I'm not Mormon, just know a lot of them. I just drink regular coffee :)

Mugicha, tea made from roasted barley is thoroughly awesome too. Very easy to finish a liter of cold mugicha unconsciously while I'm in the zone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barley_tea

Today most Mormons drink Diet Coke instead (which I can say tongue in cheek as a Mormon sipping a Diet Coke.) I've never tried Postum myself, heard of it though.

Curiously what the Mormon code of health actually prohibits is 'hot drinks' which would include Postum (but not Diet Coke!) But historically it has been interpreted to mean Coffee and Tea (and any drink derived from Coffee beans or Tea leaves, hot or cold.)

And "Mormon tea" would be similar but not caffeine -- ephedrine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephedra

Now we're talking! Definitely on my todo list of drinks to try.

it's great.

Unfortunately hard (impossible?) to come by these days in the US due to stronger restrictions related to ephedrine..

Can't you just grow the plant yourself though?

I drink Yerba Mate every day, and when I heard about yaupon, definitely had to try it.

Unroasted, it's very grassy, but refreshing. The roasted variety I got tasted quite similar to mate. It's really good.

The biggest problem I have is that I can get a kilo of mate for $9, but 2 Oz of yaupon is in the $15-$20 range.

I just found 3 oz for 13$, but thats still 17 times as expensive as Yerba Mate. I guess I might try it just for the novelty, but it's gonna take a serious agricultural effort to make this a viable product.

Where I live, yaupon is free (pick from ornamental bushes in front yard, or around practically any office building).

Around here I'd be hesitant to do that. Too many pesticides and other things sprayed on or around that stuff (particularly around office buildings with commercial groundskeepers). From personal yards, maybe since there you can control it better.

any cultivation / drying / preparation tips?

I'd love to grow some around my house (just for kicks), but apparently the climate in Utah is not good for holly bushes.

My brother lives in Texas, maybe I'll see if he can find some.

I love yerba mate. My family traveled to Argentina when I was a kid and I remember we were delayed for about 4 hours before our flight back home late in the night. I kept making myself yerba mate teas while the lounge had the movie Screamers playing on an old CRT tv. It was foundationally terrifying to a deeply-wired and awake 10 year old kid.

As a teenager I found a seller selling it on Amazon in bulk, I bought 3 kilos of it and my friends all joked that I was buying 'kilos from South America', but that tea lasted me years.

As an adult I found that brewing it in a drip coffee maker seemed to pull out more of the chemicals that woke you up and I had a period of my college years where my grades shot up from how productive I got.

In South America they also put the leaves right in the hot water in a cup and they use a special straw that looks like a spoon at the bottom with holes in it, to strain it.

I didn't find that drinking it from a gourd quite had the same effect as brewing it in an automatic drip coffee maker. The first time I tried this, I drank a few cups at around noon. That night I found myself wide awake at 3 am.

I live in Porto Alegre and.. most days I prefer the aeropress to the mate, though. Mate is a mild taste drink.

The (probably apocryphal) story I heard in botany class was that men competed to see who could chug the most hot tea before vomiting. Going to school in Tallahassee, FL, it was heartwarming to imagine that even 500 years ago, men were sitting around shouting “chug, chug, chug!” At each other

I can't link to this very nicely, but when I visited Ambras Castle in Innsbruck, Austria, they had a chair that they could put some booze into, and it doesn't release until you've drunk your way out of it. Use browser search for "certain amount" in http://www.notabletravels.com/ambras-castle-innsbruck-austri... .

Reminds me of CCC and all the Club Mate you can handle before dying from a caffeine overdose. ;)

relevant: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xywxm7/how-a-germ...

Interesting, today's info-conjunction between coffee-cancer in Cali, and raves for Cassina (never on my radar on decades). Just sayin.

I stopped drinking coffee a month ago due to some minor circulation problems. I do miss the taste and still get tempted from time to time, but I have to say that I’ve never felt more awake

I hate these clickbait-titles.

All the info is in the tagline, and when you visit the story through their site the tagline is presented before you need to click. Maybe the title should change for content aggregators, though I don't see including the name dramatically changing someone's interest in the topic.

I don't find it clickbait-ey at all. The whole point of the article is that the drink is forgotten - ergo putting its name in the headline wouldn't convey any information.

Clickbait would be if the article was about a drink we're all familiar with, and the title refused to tell us which one.

Except it's not forgotten, and if you've not heard of it the name doesn't detract at all, of you do know it then you can make a more informed decision on reading it.

> I don't find it clickbait-ey at all.

Let's consider two alternatives:

    (a) A Forgotten Drink That Caffeinated North America for Centuries
    (b) Yaupon tea: A Forgotten Drink That Caffeinated North America for Centuries

Would anybody be better off if they had chosen (b) instead of (a)? Yes, potential readers would have more information of what to expect and hence a better basis for choosing whether to click.

Would anybody be worse off if they had chosen (b) instead of (a)? Yes, Atlasobscura would get fewer clicks and hence less advertising money for yet another one of their Wikipedia copy and paste jobs.

In other words, it's clickbait.

It’s not click bait - the article is literally about how it was forgotten for centuries.

It is bait to get you to click by leaving the answer to the implied question out of the title. the question is: [what is] the forgotten drink that caffeinated north america for centuries.

It's funny to read about "a caffeinated drink called x" when I just slice & dice Jet Alert tabs into whatever mix I'm having. There are mornings when 30mg is enough to push my intuition to extreme levels, and there are days when 100mg does nothing until I find the right song on the radio. I am using caffeine and ibuprofen as experimental tools to fight depression and keeping logs on how things go. So far it's amazing how well they work. Wish I had known back when I had chronic severe depression. No medical advice here btw, keep your own logs...

At first glance this seems dangerous.

How do you measure results of your self-medication? How do you identify substances to medicate yourself with?

Have you spoken with a professional about this?

About what, caffeine? There's no difference between drinking a coke or a 30mg caffeine pill except the caffeine pill is better for you.

I think it's more about using caffeine to treat depression. Self-treating severe medical disorders can be... tricky.

No, about self-medicating severe depression.

How long have you been doing this? I was drinking a ton of coffee every day (4-6 cups of strong drip coffee) for the last 2-3 years. It helped a lot with my motivation and general energy levels. Recently (in the last year or so) I started getting some pretty significant mood swings, I'd basically feel horrible every week for Monday/Tuesday. I also had some alarming blood pressure measurements (up to 150/110 or something) which finally prompted me to quit the coffee. Not only did that reduce my blood pressure down to 136/90 but the mood swings and general funk have pretty much gone too.

I still think coffee is great for short sprints / crunch time, but I don't think I'll go back to ongoing high levels of use.

To add to this:

I have always felt like caffeine tapped into some kind of energy reserve which could be depleted. In short bursts caffeine works great but you have to take the time to recharge.

I always come back from vacation feeling much more energetic and motivated. I only really drink coffee or consume large amounts of caffeine at work. There are many benefits to time off but I have always suspected one of them was getting off caffeine for a stretch.

> mood swings

Friendly advice: drop the sugar first. It's really really hard, I know...

Caffeine is most likely to mess up your mood when you also consume sugar, or alcohol. That's why green tea for example works much better: it's disgusting to oversweeten it, to mix it with sweets, or to have it immediately before or after a pint or two ;)

Coffee otoh can even be delicious in combo with fries, ice-cream and beer. Hence I only have it in the morning when I'm not tempted to mix it in such disastrous combinations.

I eat very little sugary stuff. Plenty of booze on the weekends, which I'd originally suspected as the cause of the mood problems. Cutting the alcohol didn't change things significantly, though, while cutting the caffeine gave me two weeks of feeling awful (and I mean seriously bad), followed by a significant improvement in both mood and energy.

(Would have posted this last night but I hit the rate limiter, heh.)

> ibuprofen

What source motivated to start using ibuprofen? Aren't you worried about liver and kidney damage on long term. (And the more obviously annoying side effect to becoming habituated enough to a good OTC available antiinflammatory pill that is otherwise great for headaches and works wonders on random joint aches during hikes too, but will stop working for you in these cases :) ?...)

Just genuinely curious about why you ended up with such a seemingly suboptimal combo of substances.

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