With coffee becoming increasingly difficult to cultivate, is North America’s only native caffeinated plant set to become a café staple? Today, we explore yaupon and its Native American roots.
BY MELINA DEVONEY
BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
Featured photo courtesy of CatSpring Yaupon
Tariffs on coffee and tea-producing countries have forced Americans to turn to alternative sources of caffeine. Finally, the tariff-immune plant, yaupon is receiving the recognition it deserves as North America’s only native caffeinated plant.
Seemingly overnight, yaupon has appeared in products across the Southeast: tea bags, loose leaf tea, tea concentrate, extracts, sparkly instant tea crystals, kombucha, “matcha,” protein bars—and even skincare. A growing number of cafés, restaurants and bars are using yaupon in iced tea, boba, mocktails, and cocktails. Some cafés even serve yaupon that is roasted, ground, and pulled as espresso shots.
The saponins (plant compounds with foaming properties) in yaupon create a smooth, crema-like mouthfeel in yaupon espresso and elevates shaken beverages with a foam top. But yaupon’s greatest claim to fame is being a catalyst for social justice and environmental regeneration. The plant is sparking a renaissance within the American agricultural system while illuminating its indigenous roots.
What is Yaupon?
Botanically speaking, yaupon (Ilex vomitoria) is not a true “tea,” meaning it doesn’t come from the Camellia sinensis plant. Instead, yaupon is an evergreen shrub that has been brewed in the same fashion by Native American groups long before tea ever arrived on the continent. Yaupon is closely related to the caffeinated hollies yerba maté and guayusa.
Yaupon grows natively from what is now called North Carolina to East Texas, land once stewarded by Indigenous groups such as the Cherokee, Caddo, Timucua, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Catawba, to name a few. The name yaupon was borrowed from the Catawba language. Yaupon is a pillar of southeast ecosystems: it grows quickly, faces virtually no pest, disease or environmental concerns, is drought tolerant and provides ecosystem services such as food and refuge for animals, carbon sequestration, and soil erosion prevention. Yaupon requires no irrigation, pesticides or fertilizers to thrive in its natural habitat. The holly is a formidable crop because it matures in about three years, and can be harvested several times per year.
When yaupon leaves are air-dried or lightly roasted, it can taste like light, pleasantly grassy green tea; when the leaves are roasted darker, yaupon tastes similar to a black tea with smooth, toasted, nutty and maple flavors. As an “espresso” shot, yaupon is reminiscent of coffee with herbal and dark chocolate aromas and flavors of red fruit and oolong tea. Unlike Camellia sinensis, yaupon has no tannins (astringent, bitter plant compounds), so it will never taste bitter no matter how long or how many times it is steeped.
Caffeine Content + Health Benefits
A serving of yaupon tea contains 25-60 mg of caffeine, which is about 30% less than coffee and similar to green or black tea. Yaupon contains a trifecta of purine alkaloids similar to caffeine: theophylline, theacrine and theobromine (the happiness compound in chocolate). These alkaloids synergistically create a uniquely steady and focused energy and euphoric uplift – without the jitters or crash.
“Preliminary research suggests that (theacrine) interferes less with sleep, has a longer half life than caffeine, and works in tandem with caffeine to last longer,” says Liam Trotzuk, co-founder of Goldholly, which is based in New York.
Yaupon also boasts a wide array of health benefits due to the antioxidant activity of its many polyphenols and flavonoids.
Why Haven’t Most People Heard of Yaupon?
The short answer is: Colonialism.
Long before our historical records, nearly every Indigenous group along what we now call the U.S. Gulf Coast had a yaupon tradition and traded it all over the continent.
Yaupon was first documented by Spanish explorers in Texas in the 1540s. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, American colonies both drank and exported copious amounts of yaupon to Europe. In the late 1700s, yaupon saved caffeine-addicted Bostonians when the Boston Tea Party halted tea imports. Throughout American history, yaupon resurged among cohorts that needed cheap and local caffeine to carry on—from enslaved African Americans to soldiers during the Civil War and World Wars I and II.
Marginalized populations in the South never stopped drinking yaupon even during its malicious rebranding by colonists. “‘Yauponer’ was a colonial derogatory term that meant you’re too poor to afford imported tea,” says Abianne Falla, founder of CatSpring Yaupon in Texas and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.
From the beginning of America’s colonial history, indigeneity, race, and class contributed to waning consumption of yaupon, posits cultural anthropologist Dr. Christine Folch. She explains that Ilex vomitoria was coined by a Scottish botanist who was incentivized by the European tea industry to invoke disgust and “economic sabotage” of this competitive American tea.
Yaupon does not cause vomiting, but outsiders misunderstood its role in specific Indigenous purification rituals in which participants drank yaupon tea and then deliberately purged by vomiting. On the contrary, yaupon was regularly drunk for energy before battles, hunts and competitions, during council meetings, and for healing and spiritual connection.
Dr. Folch and other anthropologists blame the erasure of yaupon through the 19th century on a conspiratorial economic blow spearheaded by the European tea industry, compounded with the erasure of Indigenous peoples.
“With the forced relocation and general eradication of millions of the Native drinkers, yaupon was a lost legacy,” Abianne says.
Turning Over a New Leaf
The power of yaupon dawned on Abianne during one of Texas’ most severe droughts in 2011: “We lost 300 million trees statewide,” Abianne says. “Everything was dying except for yaupon.”
Abianne dove into researching the resilient plant, and started selling yaupon at farmers markets soon after.
Abianne founded CatSpring Yaupon in 2012, when virtually no commercial yaupon supply chain existed. Yaupon Brothers was founded the same year in Florida. Now, these companies are the two largest national suppliers of yaupon, expanding the tea to the West Coast with retail, wholesale, direct-to-consumer, food service and private label products. Yaupon Brothers and CatSpring are also founding members of the American Yaupon Association, which promotes awareness, education, and responsible stewardship of yaupon.
Yaupon sales soared this summer following a Washington Post article about the tariff-free tea. Still, the yaupon industry is small compared to coffee and tea, and is more expensive than imported tea even without tariffs, says Bryon White, co-founder of Yaupon Brothers.
More recently, Liam learned of yaupon and realized it could reclaim its role as America’s own caffeinated tradition—much like Ethiopian heirloom coffee, Taiwanese Camellia sinensis, Japanese matcha, and Argentinian yerba maté. Liam and his co-founders launched Goldholly this year with the goal of popularizing yaupon in the Northeast. They source certified organic yaupon from southern producers, including CatSpring Yaupon.
CatSpring sees yaupon as far more than a product—they embrace it as a plant that can bring harmony back to Texan ecosystems, re-teach us how to responsibly steward the land, and empower Indigenous peoples.
Next week, we’ll release part two of this article series, where we’ll further discuss modern-day yaupon cultivation and speak more with the people leading the movement for responsible yaupon stewardship.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melina Devoney (she/her) is a barista and freelance writer in Los Angeles zeroed in on coffee and agriculture. She aims to amplify the voices of farmers and a diversity of perspectives within the coffee industry, and she’s happiest when running on wooded trails and dancing at concerts.
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