Seven Unconnected Cultures Each Invented Their Own Caffeinated Drink
From China to the Amazon, people living far apart in place and time found different plants that do the same thing.
vlogbrothers · Caffeine is Very, Very Strange...Seven groups of humans living far apart in place and time each invented their own caffeinated drink.
The list spans the globe. People in China and East Asia brewed tea, people on opposite sides of the Red Sea brewed coffee, people in Mesoamerica drank cacao, people in West Africa chewed or brewed kola nuts, people in the Amazon basin brewed guarana, people in the southern part of the continent brewed yerba mate, and people in southeastern North America brewed yaupon.
Caffeine was probably an accidental byproduct of plant chemistry that happened to poison insects, which helped those plants survive. In people the same effect is much milder, giving a small lift that is only mildly habit forming, so people are good at noticing it and turning those plants into daily drinks.
Coffee counts as tea only in the loose sense of plant parts steeped in hot water, since it comes from seeds rather than tea leaves. Early cacao was probably so heavily flavored with other ingredients that people today would not recognize it as tea, but it was still a caffeinated drink.
Questions people ask
What is yaupon?
Yaupon is a holly bush native to the southeastern United States. Its leaves and stems contain caffeine, and Indigenous peoples dried and steeped them to make a tea. It is the only caffeinated drink plant native to North America.
What are guarana and yerba mate?
Guarana is a climbing plant from the Amazon basin whose seeds are rich in caffeine and are ground into a drink. Yerba mate is made from the dried leaves of a holly tree native to southern South America, also steeped in hot water.