Gift of the Moon, Bane of the Spanish: The Story of Yerba Mate
npr.org
npr.org
In Argentina the custom is that someone pour the water in the mate and then pass it to the other persons, following the order of a round. And everyone suck from the same bombilla (straw). It's very strange for the foreign, because they are not used to share the straws.
Paraguayans (at least the Mennonite colonists) don't have a problem with touching the bombillia either
As an American, it was really amusing.
Same glass, same amount of booze, same order in the rounds. Wonder if it's an indio+Spaniard thing? I haven't seen this anywhere else in Asia.
The taste is very different from what you get when you brew it in a french press.
That said, my favorite yerba drink is: brewed yerba, a small bit of milk, and some peppermint syrup.
Absolutely delicious. Many, many, many lines of code have been written because of that combination.
I'm an Argentine who enjoys mate. While in Germany I tried a Club Mate and found it disgusting. It may be an acquired taste though, much as plain mate is, and I'd gladly give it a second chance if I could get my hands on some.
It's more difficult to find than Club Mate (it's a local brew from Hamburg). Depending on your taste, it contains much less sugar than Club Mate and feels more 'herbal', I prefer this.
If you're looking for places to buy, Matekarte[1] provides a nice map detailing who sells what and the latest status (in stock, only few left, out of stock). Unfortunately, it appears to only be available in german.
These drinks really have very little to do with the taste/experience of the traditional S. American mate though...
I only know two places to get it in California. One, The Fizzary on Haight in SF, the other Galcos Old World Grocery in Pasadena although my impression of Galcos is they aren't going to keep stocking it.
It's one of many drinks that seem like they could do well with the right marketing and distribution.
I imagine it would catch on in a far bigger way, but no one has heard of it. It was only through a HN article on SoundCloud's Berlin offices that we decided to try some.
Second, it's catching on in the Netherlands through the underground. All hackerspaces have their own supply line, either through their own import, or through other channels. There are now several wholesalers who sell it, and I'm starting to see it in small cafe's as well.
I've also heard that there is a cocktailbar in Amsterdam which uses Club Mate in some of their cocktails.
Argentina has a much larger fraction of "white" people than Brazil, right?
I understood you were comparing Argentina as a whole to Brazil as a whole (and the latter has a much larger fraction of black/mixed/amerindian people, the other 90 million who are not white i.e. half of the population).
But fair enough, since you mentioned moving from Argentina to Brazil, I should have assumed shortest path :) and guessed you were talking about Rio Grande do Sul or Santa Catarina (obvious after reading your other references to it on this post).
P.S.: I need to update my "memorized demographics" - I remembered Brazil's population was 180 million but that's the number for 2002, today it's 200 million. An easy mistake to make coming from a country with a stagnant population growth...
You're mixing relative and absolute numbers to make your point. Brazil has 4 times the population of Argentina.
I mean it's like me arguing it's more common to see irish in the US than in Ireland. There are 33 million irish descendants in the US - That's like 6 times the population of Ireland...
The difference is the distribution on the 'white scale' if you will. Brazil has a higher influence of fairer-skinned Europeans (vast majority Portuguese, but with substantial German/Polish/Scandinavian) compared to Argentina (mostly Italian/Spanish, with tiny pockets of German, Swiss and British here and there.)
tl; dr: the chances of meeting a 'fair skinned' (defined as "European descendant) person are roughly the same in Argentina and Brazil. The chances of that person being blonde and have very fair skin are higher in Brazil.
(p.s. from my own anecdata: I consider myself to be smack in the middle of the darkness scale for Argentina, not too fair, not too dark. When I first moved to the South of Brazil I was surprised by how much I stood out in a group for being 'tan'.)
without any specific tradition of sharing coming to mind, cold sores were pretty common in Russia while i never heard about genital herpes when i lived there (while there were normal occurrence of other STDs).
I've also brewed them loose in a pot and strained with a mesh. The main thing when brewing loose, or in bags is to wait for a minute after the water brews. The tea doesnt like boiling water.