How is Yerba Mate Consumed?

Yerba Mate is a tea, and can be used like any other tea. Its most popular form comes in 500 gram or 1000 gram bags of loose-leaf tea that is dried and ground. In some places it is available in tea bags, called Mate Cocido, but these do not provide the strength and full benefit of the more traditional methods for drinking it.

Yerba Mate (literally, the "Mate Herb") gets its name from the traditional cup (called Mate as well) used to drink it. This cup, originally a dried and decorated gourd, can be made out of almost anything these days. In South America, where Mate was introduced to the world, Mate is still sipped from the Mate cup using a metal or wood decorative straw & filter called a bombilla.

The modern Mate drinker can choose any number of ways to extract the beneficial tea from the herb. It can be brewed like normal loose-leaf tea and filtered before pouring into a cup. It can be used in a coffee press, where the herb is infused with hot water, and then the herb is pressed out of the way of the tea. It can be made into a flavorful iced tea to drink on a hot summer day (Terere, pronounced Ted-der-ae). It can be made like coffee, in a standard automatic coffee maker (make sure you use a large amount of the herb). And, if you have a yerba mate cup and a bombilla, you can follow in the footsteps of the ancients by sipping Mate the traditional way.

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