Yaupon (yō-pon) Holly is popular small tree or shrub that few realize makes a wonderful tea with a deep-rooted history in North America, but it's popularity is on the rise. Growing wild, it's then harvested by hand on our land in Texas. Yaupon is the only caffeinated plant that is native to North America, used for centuries by indigenous peoples and early settlers. Yaupon is coming back into the light as a sustainable and delicious option for making hot and iced tea right in our own backyard. Quite literally, Yaupon grows wild from Virginia to Florida and along the Gulf of Mexico and through Texas and could be in your own yard right now as it's often used as a planted shrub that grows fairly effortlessly.
THE HISTORY OF YAUPON
There was a time that Yaupon was consumed by most all people in Southern America and traded regularly. Yaupon was once called "cassina" by the native Timucua tribe that lived in southern Georgia and northern Florida, and named "black drink" by Spanish explorers due to it's color when roasted. The exact way that Yaupon was brewed in unknown, as recipes were lost to time and varied so widely between cultures and tribes. I think this is one of the best written articles on Yaupon Holly that I have come across, so I will partially quote and link them below and I encourage you to read their entire article, as it's pretty interesting!
"The oldest-known evidence of yaupon consumption comes from the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, where the holly’s residue was identified inside ornately decorated ceramic vessels dating to 1050AD. While archaeological evidence suggests that the beverage was important to Native American culture for at least 1,000 years, the most widely distributed descriptions of its use come from Europeans such as Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who identified yaupon while exploring the Texas coast in 1542, and English-Jamaican merchant Jonathan Dickinson, who observed several yaupon ceremonies in Florida after being shipwrecked in 1696. Though it was also consumed as an everyday, energising beverage among Native Americans, yaupon was commonly associated with purification and was incorporated into men’s-only rituals that often involved fasting, drinking and vomiting to cleanse the body and mind.
Before a big decision was made, yaupon would be consumed to purify people so that their decisions were clear,” said University of South Florida ethnobotanist and medical anthropologist Dr Anna Dixon. Yaupon has no emetic properties, so historians postulate that other herbs were occasionally mixed in to induce vomiting, and that the sheer act of drinking huge volumes of yaupon on an empty stomach could have been vomit-producing on its own.
A collection of first-hand accounts compiled by Dr William Sturtevant, past curator at the Smithsonian Institution, noted that as Europeans continued to explore and colonise the southern United States, they frequently encountered yaupon and often assimilated it into their own lives. At the Spanish outpost of Saint Augustine in northern Florida, yaupon was consumed to such an extent that in his 1615 chronicles of New World medicinal plants, botanist Francisco Ximenez noted that, “Any day that a Spaniard does not drink it, he feels he is going to die.” In his volume, Black Drink published in 1979 which explores the history of yaupon, anthropologist Dr Charles Hudson of the University of Georgia noted that by the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the holly was grown on colonial farms, consumed widely in towns across the US South and traded to Europe where it was popularly sold in London as South Seas Tea and served in Parisian salons as Apalachine. Yaupon’s success as an international beverage, however, was not to last.
While travelling through North Carolina in 1783, German botanist Johann David Schöpf recorded in his diaries that the naturally sweet alternative to traditional black tea had become so popular by the 1780s that the British East India Company deemed it a threat to their control of the tea market, and England limited yaupon’s importation into Europe. In 1789, William Aiton, a famed botanist and the first superintendent of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, appointed by King George III, gave yaupon its controversial scientific name, Ilex vomitoria. While some believe that Aiton’s nomenclature reflected yaupon’s ritual consumption among Native Americans, others believe it was a politically motivated smear campaign to further squash the threat to the English tea trade. Whatever his underlying motivation, Aiton’s unsavoury naming tainted yaupon’s reputation and instilled a lasting fear of unwanted side effects.
By the mid-1800s, yaupon’s popularity in the US further declined as it became associated with poor, rural communities who could not afford to import traditional Chinese tea. The plant's intimate connection to Native American communities also diminished, as tribes were either wiped out or relocated to regions where yaupon didn’t grow. While yaupon ceremonies have persisted within some Native American tribes such as the Cherokee, and the beverage maintained popularity along isolated coastal areas in North Carolina, the tea became largely forgotten in the United States by the 1860s where it grew incognito for nearly 150 years."
Source:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210223-yaupon-the-rebirth-of-americas-forgotten-tea
Yaupon has many benefits over traditional tea and coffee including:
Virtually tannin free for a bitter free taste and can't be over-steeped. You can simply add more water to your cup up to 3 times to extract all of the flavor, with the majority of the caffeine in the first cup.
30% less caffeine than coffee for less jitters and a more balanced boost of energy.
Highly sustainable due to being native, requiring little water, and no pesticides or chemicals.
Has a significantly lower environmental impact and can be responsibly harvested using methods that benefit biodiversity.
Requires no deforestation.
Locally sourced for a small carbon footprint.
Oxalate free for those with kidney issues or sensitivities
Wild. Natural. All-American.
It's good for you!
Yaupon tea is packed with antioxidants that support overall wellness. Rich in polyphenols, it may help fight oxidative stress and support heart and immune health, while also being gentle on the stomach. Clean, sustainable, and deeply rooted in tradition, yaupon tea offers a refreshing way to feel focused, nourished, and naturally energized.
Some other interesting videos to watch:
Discover more about Yaupon tea from Legacy Wilderness Academy HERE.
Yaupon Holly Makes a Tea Drunk By Millions, Then We Stopped Using It. Here's Why.
Native Southern Tribes Discovered This Ancient Caffeinated Drink
IT'S THE BEES KNEES OF TEAS
