Yerba Mate For Smiles All Day

Yerba Mate For Smiles All Day

This year’s Valentine’s Day may be behind us, but we consider the entire month as a parade of love, heart and good will. And so it thrills us to welcome author Ashish Kothari to our flagship Boulder store for a book reading and conversation next week, the first we have held since COVID disrupted so many things. Ashish, a Boulder resident and former McKinsey consultant, is the founder of the Happiness Squad, a company that aims to help businesses stoke and bolster well-being and happiness among employees and within communities.

His book, Hardwired for Happiness: 9 Proven Practices to Overcome Stress and Live Your Best Life, serves as an engaging and thoughtful guide for how to nurture and sustain well-being and happiness in lives that have grown awfully busy. As he pointed out with us recently, “We can do things today that take 15 percent of the time they did just 20 years ago, like ordering food, booking travel, and connecting with friends. But that doesn’t meant we enjoy an abundance of free time. In fact, we have less time than ever.”

The reason, he says, revolves around fear; humans are hard-wired for it. And today, thanks to myriad and constant stimuli that provoke fear, most of us maintain a heightened relationship with the powerful emotion.

The book offers a practical path toward surmounting fear and its manifestations, and ripening a healthier relationship with this emotion that accompanied us through our evolution as humans. 

Fear is not bad — after all, for our long-ago ancestors fearing things like sabertooth cats and snakes was essential for survival. And it remains vital today: If we didn’t fear activities like walking across car-clogged streets or leaping into raging rivers, we’d be in trouble. The problem today is that we face daily parades of conjured fears; we aren’t facing down too many bears these days. But we are navigating lots of emails.

We look forward to welcoming you into our store on Wednesday, February 22 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. to listen to Ashish explore the key topics within his excellent new book.

And when you swing by, do check out our selection of a favorite kind of tea, yerba mate. We with yerba mate is happy tea, indeed.

What is yerba mate?

People across South America, but mostly in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and southern Brazil, have been drinking the leaves from the yerba mate plant for centuries, beginning with the Guaranis, an indigenous people. Eventually, Spanish colonizers encountered the stimulating plant (a relative of the holly plant), embraced it for its energy and flavor, and began cultivating yerba mate; previously, it had always been wild.

A farmer in Ecuador tending to his yerba mate trees.

Today, it’s the national drink of Uruguay and Paraguay, and is more widely consumed in Argentina than coffee or traditional tea. Instead of brewing it in tea pots and pouring into cups, most South Americans infuse loose yerba mate in hollow gourds — these are widely available commercially, including through Ku Cha — and sip the brew through metal straws. 

Like coffee and tea, yerba mate contains caffeine; coffee has the most caffeine, followed by yerba mate and then tea. 

Why drink yerba mate?

We started Ku Cha as passionate advocates for traditional tea, Camellia sinensis. But soon after pursuing our crazy idea of opening a tea shop, we began exploring other brewed beverages to complement our tea selection; yerba mate quickly stood out. We loved the unique flavor, the blend of botanicals within the tea, and the caffeine quotient: not as potent as coffee, but stronger than tea.

We offer four yerbas, and one close relative, guayusa. They all offer distinct flavors, but share at least one thing: They inspire happiness, through bright flavors and mental stimulation.


Drink Yerba Mate: Classic Organic Yerba Mate

Classic yerba mate is herbal and earthy. Lovely, too.

Yerba mate gets roasted, or incorporated into blends. But most of it is brewed green, like this classic organic yerba mate. Known as the”Drink of the Gods” by indigenous people in South America, our finely chopped yerba with very few stems comes from Brazil. It brews a deep straw color and is bright with a sweet and earthy aftertaste. Yerba mate is best brewed at a lower temperature with one scoop of the herb for each cup.


Drink Yerba Mate: Roasted Organic Yerba Mate

Roasted yerba mate is sweeter, and less earthy than green. We love it.

Where our classic version is just harvested and packaged, the roasted style punctuates harvest with time spent in a roaster, yielding small leaves that are dark brown in color and taste sweet and, yes, roasted. Among other things, the roasting process helps eliminate the more earthier flavors of regular yerba mate. We savor those earthy flavors, but we also champion how the roasted rendition transforms the brew into something slightly sweeter, with even malt overtones. 


Drink Yerba Mate: Boulder Boost

Boulder Boost offers a wide variety of herbs, including yerba mate’s close relative, guayusa.

Ready for a taste sensation? A brew to stoke intellectual stimulation? Then our organic Boulder Boost is for you. In addition to organic green yerba mate — the classic — this blend contains guayusa, a close cousin of yerba mate’s that indigenous people in parts of South America drink today. It’s also quite popular with anybody who enjoys yerba mate, as the brew is naturally sweet, with an exceptional balance of caffeine, antioxidants, vitamins and amino acids. In addition to these powerhouses, Boulder Boost incorporates the South African bush rooibos into the blend (it’s packed with electrolytes and antioxidants), tulsi (a widely celebrated herb used by naturopathic physicians to aid with myriad conditions), cinnamon, ginger, allspice, fennel and rose.

This is no shrinking violet! And it’s positively delicious.

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