SPOTLIGHT | Yerba Mate’s Meticulous Chronicler

Prof. Christine Folch is one of the world’s authorities on the history of beverages. A delightful storyteller, anthropologist, and historian, she recently penned The Book of Yerba Mate: A Stimulating History, released this week by Princeton University Press.

“Brewed from the dried leaves and tender shoots of an evergreen tree native to South America, yerba mate gives its drinkers the jolt of liquid effervescence many of us get from coffee or tea,” Christine tells Tea Biz correspondent Jessica Natale Woollard in a wide-ranging and engaging conversation about the world’s third-most popular naturally stimulating beverage.

BIO: Christine Folch is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University in North Carolina. Yerba mate is the most well-known of the three ilex beverages, and as you're going to hear from Christine, it did become widely popular, just not everywhere. In a previous conversation on Tea Biz, she traced the history of yaupon and guayusa—two native stimulants that never managed to compete on the world stage with coffee and tea during those first few centuries of Colonial America. In Argentina, southern "gaúcho" Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, mate is the stimulating brew of choice, famously quaffed by the Argentine national football team en route to its 2022 FIFA World Cup victory.

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