My brother introduced me to Mate after he served an LDS mission in Malaga, Spain. Some immigrants from South America had him try some, and immediately he was in love. When he returned, I saw him drinking this strange green mixture out of a guampa, so I asked him what it was. He told me that it was a delicious kind of herbal beverage, harvested from the Yerba Mate plant. He said it had an unusually intriguing taste and that it gave him loads of energy in the LDS mission field. I shrugged my shoulders and took a sip. The taste felt very odd and foreign in my mouth. “You have to get used to it. It’s an acquired taste,” he told me. And sure enough, after a day of drinking Mate, I actually began to enjoy it. For the next few weeks I began to drink more and more of it, and soon it became my favorite beverage, my elixir.
Yerba Mate, the Drink of the Gods definitely lives up to its godly title. There is a wide spectrum of flavour in the world of Mate, everything from original and organic to coffee and mint. There are literally dozens of brands, from bitter Canarias to tangy Taragui, with a million choices in between, and I promise you’ll never get bored because there’s always a new kind of Mate to try. You can drink liters of it without feeling sick and you can have it both steamy hot and icy cold. It works as a breakfast drink, a sports drink, an energy drink, or an anytime-anywhere drink. I actually take it to school and work with me!
To this day Mate has become a big part of me, and every day that I drink it I feel more focused, stronger and happier. I’ve shared the Mate culture with my friends and have even organized Mate parties at my house. Its a smorgasbord of taste for your tummy, and a high-power energizer for your mind. If you add Yerba Mate to your life, I promise you will never be happier.