Te Back in Business
Té Lovers Newsletter - Téngo Tango!
In this Issue:
- Téngo Tango
- Focus on our teas: Yerba Mate
Téngo Tango
Starting this tomorrow, November 3, Friday nights at Té will be full of passion. Tango passion, that is :)
Come to dance, or merely to watch, over a hot yerbe mate and empanadas, Argentine style. BYOB is welcome as well (corkage fee $3). From 9 pm to midnight.
Focus on our Teas: Yerba Mate
Yerbe mate is a very popular drink in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with a very strong social custom. Traditionally, mate is drunk from a calabash gourd, with a metal straw (bombilla), and is shared among friends. Strictly speaking, yerba mate is not a tea, but what the tea industry calls a tisane, or herbal tea.
The yerba mate is member of the holly family, which studies have shown to have very interesting medicinal properties. Mate (pronounced ma tay, thus it is often misspelled as "maté") is the only caffeinated tisane at our shop. Caffeine in mate is often called mateine, and in combination with other chemicals in mate (or the lack of some of coffee's chemicals), the stimulative effect of mate seems to be quite different than coffee. Most consumers report mate's effects as "alertness, without the jitters". In South America, mate is consumed for the relief of many ills, including fatigue, depression, allergies, and stomach ulcers. In Europe, it additionally has a reputation as an aid for weight loss (it is "thermogenic", i.e., fat-burning).
While we're on the subject of caffeine, just how much caffeine is in your tea? Well, this definitely does depend on the kind of tea, and how it's prepared (multiple steepings, for example, will bring out more caffeine in your drink. But, steep first, and throw out the first steeping, and you've reduced the caffeine content by about 80%!). Here's a useful comparison, based on drinks as they are typically prepared. These are the average amount of caffeine in a 6 ounce drink:
| mate | 50 - 100 mg |
| coffee | 100 - 250 mg |
| black tea | 10 - 60 mg |
| chocolate | 13 mg |
And most green teas have about 1/5 of the caffeine of black tea. Very little indeed :)
