Gottatea Blog

You can't imagine your morning without an invigorative cup of coffee, can you? Are you addicted to its stimulant effect? Do you know that there is a delicious beverage providing the same stimulant upshot as coffee, but without the jittery side effects and addictive tendencies? It's called yerba mate tea. It is also known as green mate tea or herbal mate tea. Would you like to discover the magic world of yerba mate tea wrapped in a shroud of South American legends? Welcome to GottaTea.com!

Actually, South Americans have enjoyed strong vegetal flavor and multiple benefits of yerba mate tea for centuries already. The Guaraní are reputed to be the first people who cultivated that plant. The history and culture of green mate tea began in the region that now includes Paraguay, Southern Brazil, South-Eastern Bolivia, North-Eastern Argentina and Uruguay. According to one ancient Guaraní legend, the Goddesses of the Moon and the Cloud made a gift of the plant yerba mate to one old man who had saved them from the beast Yaguareté (a jaguar) when they came to the Earth to visit it. The first Europeans who cultivated herbal mate tea were Jesuit missionaries, who spread this tea culture as far as Ecuador.

In fact, yerba mate tea comes from the plant yerba mate, which is a shrub or small tree with evergreen leaves and small, greenish-white flowers, so it is not a true tea. The beverage called herbal mate tea is prepared from steeping dry leaves and stems of yerba mate in hot water, rather than in boiling water like other types of tea.

Grown in the sub-tropical rainforests of Argentina, Brasil and Paraguay, green mate tea has long been revered as the "drink of the gods". Drinking yerba mate tea with friends from a shared hollow gourd with a metal straw is a common social practice in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Eastern Bolivia, Southern and Western Brazil and also has been cultivated in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.