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TapTheForwardAssist
Apr 9, 2007

Pretty Little Lyres

quote:

Yerba Mate


Well, that's great and all, but maybe you prefer to imbibe enough caffeine in a single drink that your heart explodes. In that case, try Mate!
Mate comes from a South American plant and has roughly the same amount of caffeine per cup as a cup of coffee does. It's traditionally drunk from a gourd, and has an earthy-foresty taste which can be odd at first but is pretty easy to get used to and even enjoy. It's become pretty popular lately, and you can probably find some in your local grocery's health food aisle.

I've glanced through the current thread, and haven't seen much follow-through on yerba maté. I'm going to pull the elder-goon card here and share a few observations based on my NGO work in Paraguay in the mid-1990s, when I was sipping mate and most of y'all were sipping tit-milk.

At the time, mate in Paraguay,at least in Caaguazú Department, was generally drunk out of a guampa, a cup made of wood or horn, with a bombilla, a metal drinking-straw with a sieve at the end. You'd kick back with a group of people, they'd pull out a guampa packed with yerba mate, and a pitcher of water, and start filling it up and passing it around. Normally, you'd pour some water into the guampa, suck the now-infused liquid out the bombilla, then fill it and pass it to the next person. Wiki mentions a few variants, and of those I vaguely recall putting a little sugar in the guampa, putting some bitter "medicinal" herbs in the guampa, and using either hot or cold water depending on situation. In the local almacences (rural corner shops) they sold mate packaged in cardboard boxes, either plain or with (as I recall) lemongrass or some kind of lemon-something. I recall the family I was living with mentioning that a lot of people would get aviciado ("addicted", same root-word as "vice") to mate. I also about loving keeled over during that project when I accepted some mate from some locals who swore their pitcher had well-water, when instead it had swamp-water, and I expelled large portions of my drat insides over a 24 hour period and felt like Death personified. But that was 95% due to bacterial issues and only 5% to mate.

I generally recall mate tasting like grass and dirt, but not necessarily unpleasant. I clearly recall doing a really huge and long-running (like 12+ passes) yerba mate circle with some other NGO workers during the weekend we were away from our projects, and having absolutely ungodly gastrointestinal repercussions seldom seen since due to the sheer amount of caffeine and whatever other active ingredients. That said, I would strongly recommend trying yerba mate, but mainly if you can get a group of friends and do a proper pass-around in your circle while bullshitting. It's not necessarily a bad beverage by itself, but it's way cooler if you can fill up a cup (either a proper guampa or those gay-rear end gourd things Brazilian dicks use) and keep it passing in a circle and slurping through a metal straw.

No other significant observations, just 3rd World horror stories from the brief period where I was trying to help people rather than rain artillery fire down on them. In any case, stop being a limp-dick and do a proper yerba-mate pass around until about 2AM while playing cards or circle-jerking or whatever you kids do. It adds a certain flair to the occasion.

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