Yaupon Holly

North America’s only indigenous caffeine deserves a seat at the tea party

by

An overwhelming percentage of people who are asked about yaupon holly have never heard of it, let alone harvested it for tea leaves. But those familiar with the homegrown caffeine rave about its taste and efficacy. Joseph Hosey, who promotes Mississippi’s edible wilderness online as the Free State Forager, drinks it daily. 

A holly varietal, yaupon (pronounced YO-pon) is a close cousin of Argentina’s yerba mate and is North America’s sole caffeinated plant. The plant’s incredible tolerance allows it to grow wild in coastal areas of varying habitats. Females boast bright berries of Bishop robe red in the cooler months and tiny white flowers in the spring. 

But those familiar with the homegrown caffeine rave about its taste and efficacy.

Botanists describe yaupon as a perennial shrub that can grow like a tree. Its territory spans from the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas, its supposed point of origin, to the coasts of southeastern Maryland and Virginia, the eastern half of Texas, and across the Southern coastal states to Florida. It serves as an important source of food and shelter for winter migratory birds and is an excellent pollinator too.

Perhaps you’ve clipped a few stems for the plant’s evergreen appearance and droplets of red berries around the Christmas holidays. It makes for an excellent festive bouquet. Many people have hacked the holly away as weeds, or, alternately, sowed it deliberately to add lush color and habitat to a garden. “Hidden in plain sight” idiomatically comes to mind as a means of describing the indigenous plant currently suffering social exclusion from the modern tea party. But why? Bad branding. 

[Read this: John Coykendall is saving Washington Parish, seed by seed.]

During its heyday, yaupon was the energy drink of choice for natives of the southeast North America. Yaupon holly, or Ilex vomitoria if you prefer the baroque, has a long cultural history. Records show several tribes brewed the leaves and stems of Yaupon into a strong tea. Europeans called it “The Black Drink,” which contributed to its lack of popularity among the colonists. 

In pre-colonial tradition, tribe members wouldn’t be sitting down for fresh morning brew the way today’s consumers imbibe caffeinated beverages. They drank it ceremonially, specifically before large athletic events. Dr. Julia Skinner, author of Afternoon Tea: A History, and the founder and director of Root, an Atlanta-based food history and fermentation organization, describes these as “Very Big Deal” occasions. 

[Read this: Old School Coffee—Chicory, French drip pots, and tradition.]

“The Apalachee tribe has a very long pre-colonial tradition of turning yaupon holly into tea,” said Skinner. Athletes, who held a high place in Apalachee society, would drink black tea as a part of their purification rituals before athletic events or fighting. “But they weren’t just sipping a little bit of the tea, they were drinking decent amounts, with accounts of men drinking enough tea to make them vomit.” Word spread that it was the plant that caused the digestive response, and, like many Native American traditions, the practice became the subject of various rumors and mischaracterizations. 

In the 1730s, when the English advanced into the area, Apalachee tribes began to move deeper into the Gulf Coast region, where their descendants remain today, many in Louisiana, explained Skinner. As part of their efforts to quiet native culture and establish dominance, the English imported and sold black teas instead of drinking the local yaupon. 

Word spread that it was the plant that caused the digestive response, and, like many Native American traditions, the practice became the subject of various rumors and mischaracterizations. 

But the the yaupon was more than demoted, it was erased. Europeans often fearfully rejected the local rituals and teas without even taking a sip.This wasn’t helped by the yaupon’s reputation as a cause for vomiting, which was further perpetuated by its name, given by the British botanist William Aiton; Ilex vomitoria roughly translates to “holly that makes you vomit.” 

However, according to Heather Kirk-Ballard of LSU AgCenter’s Get It Growing program, scientists have found an overwhelming lack of evidence to suggest that yaupon was used as an agent to induce vomiting.  

Though time, chance, and circumstance have kept yaupon from widespread familiarity, naturalists and foragers have long worked to preserve this plant-as-a-beverage and its cracked history. And now, a few Southern producers and some superfans are attempting to resurrect the native species.

Though time, chance, and circumstance have kept yaupon from widespread familiarity, naturalists and foragers have long worked to preserve this plant-as-a-beverage and its cracked history. And now, a few Southern producers and some superfans are attempting to resurrect the native species.

If there were a gold medal for pioneering the return of yaupon holly to its former glory, Lou Thomann, founder of Asi Tea Company, is certainly a front-runner. John “Crawfish” Crawford, a naturalist of the coastal Georgia area, first introduced Thomann to the yaupon holly on a nature walk off the coast of Georgia in 2008. Since then, Thomann has developed a deep fascination with ethnobotany, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the scientific study of the traditional knowledge and customs of a people concerning plants and their medical, religious, and other uses.” He launched Asi Tea Co. in 2010 as an effort to embrace and promote yaupon’s history, and to combat the nefarious actions of big tea importers to blacklist the product through branding and research. 

This summer, Thomann opened Yaupon Teahouse + Apothecary, in Savannah, Georgia, where yaupon-infused wellness products are exhibited alongside Asi teas. But for Thomann, this is just the beginning. He believes the plant can do even more than we currently realize. 

“The Native Americans lived with them [yaupon], so they knew the plant on the high hill underneath the oak tree, you can smoke that,” he said. “The one near the riverbank is more for relaxing, closer to the marsh to regulate menstrual cycles; they knew all this because they knew how it grew in those environments.” 

Thomann hopes to explore the way yaupon interacts with different environments in this way by canvassing the natural territory, taking samples of the soil and the leaves, and learning about how the plant is expressing itself. “We are trying to do more in-depth mapping and genome studies—so we can see learn about the plant’s morphology, genetics, and environmental influences. It’s a long term project, so the more people who really dive into it and really feel the magic of this plant, the better.”

His farm is a pilot program working with several grants—including one from the USDA—and collaborates with a few research universities. Yaupon has proven itself a fantastic understory crop and works well with the agroforestry model of one of Thomann’s farms. He’s also begun research on row cropping wild yaupon and experimenting with different fertilizers and protocols to see how the plant responds. “The leaf wants to do good things,” he said. “In nature, in the wild picking, you get different varieties.” By isolating crops for research, Thomann seeks to identify how growing environment changes the composition and ways to use that in his production. 

In today’s caffeine culture, turning Yaupon Holly into tea commodity is more than just historically cool. It is also a sustainable way forward, and a local alternative to teas that have traveled across continents. And, since why and how the plant disappeared can be drawn back to its—to borrow Mr. Thomann’s phrasing—“bad botanical name,” he likes to use the story as a selling point.  

A new tea-economy anyone?  

Now Make the Tea!

Editor's note: Andrea Blumenstein’s fascinating article on the yaupon holly comeback begged for a recipe—but where to find yaupon holly? We Googled, we called nurseries, we wondered if we might have to wait ‘til Christmas—and then, we looked in the side yard of the Country Roads office. Lo and behold, a yaupon holly tree. Snip, pluck, roast, and steep—et voilà, tea. A more detailed recipe follows.

Ingredients:

4 oz. yaupon holly leaves (rinsed and dried, berries removed) 

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. Spread leaves on a sheet pan. Roast for 15–20 minutes until easily broken.

2. Finely crumble leaves. Store in a cool, dry place until ready to use.

To brew tea: Use 1.5 teaspoons per cup of water. Bring water to a boil, then use a mesh strainer to steep tea for 10 minutes. Remove strainer and serve.