An organic loose-leaf blend of green maté and mint from POP TEE — caffeinated, herbal, and one of the more useful things to have in a cupboard for the afternoon.
Maté is not tea. It is the dried leaf of Ilex paraguariensis, a South American holly, drunk daily by tens of millions of people across Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil, where the gourd and metal straw are as ordinary a domestic object as a teapot is in Europe. It carries caffeine — roughly comparable to tea, less than coffee — along with theobromine, the milder stimulant that gives chocolate its lift, and a set of polyphenols and saponins that give it a characteristic vegetal bitterness.
Why mint is the obvious partner. Green maté is grassy and genuinely bitter, and mint does two things about it at once: menthol reads as cooling, which lightens the whole cup, and it also occupies the palate strongly enough to sit over the bitterness rather than beside it. It is the standard way maté is softened for people meeting it for the first time, and it works.
The cold trick that most people miss. Menthol produces its cooling sensation not by lowering temperature but by binding to TRPM8, the nerve receptor that actually detects cold. Your nervous system cannot tell the difference. This is why a hot mint infusion still reads as refreshing, and why this blend is exceptional iced.
Brewing matters more with maté than with most things. Do not use boiling water. Around 80 °C is right; boiling water scalds the leaf and extracts a harsh bitterness that no amount of sugar will fix. This is the single mistake that makes people decide they do not like maté.
An honest note. Maté is a stimulant drink and a pleasant one. Long-term studies have associated very hot maté drinking with oesophageal cancer risk — the current evidence points to the temperature of the liquid rather than the plant, and the same association appears for any beverage drunk scaldingly hot. Let it cool before drinking. That is worth knowing and easy to act on.
Available at Só Verde, an organic concept store in Foz, Porto.