Spooky and Surprising Facts About Yerba Mate

Halloween is coming, the evenings are getting darker, and the Netherlands is slowly filling up with pumpkins, so I thought this was the perfect moment to share some spooky, weird and surprising facts about yerba mate. Grab a can, dim the lights a little, and let's go.

Let's start with the most Halloween one of all. The traditional gourd Brazilians drink chimarrão from, the cuia, is made from a calabash, which belongs to the same plant family as pumpkins. So every time someone in the south of Brazil sips their mate, they're basically drinking out of a pumpkin's cousin. Very jack o'lantern of them.

Then there's the legend. The Guaraní people, who were drinking mate long before Europeans arrived, tell a story about the Moon and the Cloud, who came down to Earth one night disguised as two women and were attacked by a jaguar in the dark forest. An old man saved them, and as a thank you they gave him a magical plant that would bring energy and friendship to his people, and that plant was yerba mate. A little spooky, a little sweet, and a lot more interesting than most origin stories.

A dark leather mate gourd with a golden bomba next to a small orange pumpkin and a pot of yellow autumn flowers on a wooden bench.

And now for a real mystery. In the 1600s, Jesuit missionaries started growing yerba mate on plantations and figured out how to make the seeds sprout, which is surprisingly tricky. When they were kicked out of South America in the 1700s, that secret disappeared with them, and for more than a hundred years nobody could grow it properly, so people had to go deep into the forest to collect leaves from wild trees. Some say the trick has to do with birds, since the seeds seem to sprout better after a bird has eaten them.

You might also hear people whisper about mateine, a mysterious gentler kind of caffeine only found in mate. Plot twist, it's basically a ghost, because it's the same caffeine you'd find in coffee. What makes mate feel different is that it comes with other natural compounds like theobromine, which is also in chocolate, and that's one reason a lot of people say it feels smoother and less jittery.

And for something less spooky, mate comes from a tree in the holly family, so while we're all carving pumpkins, it's already getting ready for Christmas.

So whether you're throwing a Halloween party, hiding from the doorbell, or getting the lanterns ready for Sint Maarten, grab a cold Mati and keep it all treat and no trick, with real mate energy and zero sugar.