Here's The Buzz On America's Forgotten Native 'Tea' Plant
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/201...ative-tea-plant
August 4, 20155:49 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
By Murray Carpenter
3-Minute Listen




Yaupon growing in the wild in east Texas. This evergreen holly was once valuable to Native American tribes in the Southeastern U.S., which made a brew from its caffeinated leaves.
Murray Carpenter for NPR

During a severe drought in 2011, JennaDee Detro noticed that many trees on the family cattle ranch in Cat Spring, Texas, withered, but a certain evergreen holly appeared vigorous. It's called a yaupon.

"The best we can tell is that they enjoy suffering," Detro says with a laugh. "So this kind of extreme weather in Texas — and the extreme soil conditions — are perfect for the yaupon."

Detro began researching yaupon — a tree abundant in its native range, from coastal North Carolina to East Texas — and discovered that the plant contains caffeine and has a remarkable history.

A thousand years ago, Native American traders dried, packed and shipped the leaves all the way to Cahokia, the ancient mound city near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Native Americans sometimes used it in purification rituals involving purging (this led to its Latin name, Ilex vomitoria — a misnomer, because yaupon is not an emetic). Traveling through North Carolina in 1775, the naturalist William Bartram said Cherokees called yaupon "the beloved tree." Early settlers even exported yaupon to Europe.

But yaupon was eventually elbowed aside by what purists call true tea — made from the leaves of the Asian shrub Camellia sinensis. (Technically, yaupon is an herbal infusion.) Because of yaupon's recent obscurity, Detro had to learn how to dry and prepare the leaves on her own.

"There is a lost art of preparing yaupon tea," says Detro, "because there are so many years between the Native American use of yaupon tea and our modern use of yaupon tea."

(Left) A box of Cat Spring Yaupon Tea, produced by JennaDee Detro and her sister, Abianne Falla. (Right) A glass of iced yaupon tea as served at Odd Duck, a farm-to-table restaurant in Austin, Texas.

After Detro learned how to process the leaves, she told her sister, Abianne Falla, about her plans to sell the product at a farmers market or two. "At first, when she was telling me about it, I kind of had the same mentality of everyone around here, 'Well, let me taste it first,' " says Falla. "And as soon as I did, it was like, 'We might be onto something. I think we should make a run of it.' "

The sisters started selling their Cat Spring Yaupon Tea online two years ago, both a green tea and a roasted black tea. And Falla began getting the tea onto store shelves and into restaurants. Now the tea is being served at Austin restaurants like Dai Due and Odd Duck that focus on locally sourced food.

Odd Duck manager Jason James said he was surprised to learn about the tea. But he was pleased to find the taste familiar. "The flavor profile of it, I don't think it's too far off from a black tea," he says. "The tannin structures are a little bit different."-- excerpt, rest at link above --

I know, and I hesitated, Isailedaway.

And, thanks for the offer, but we have plenty. It does turn out that our goats do eat it. It's not their first choice, but they do eat it.