Goodbye Coffee, Hello Yaupon

Like 70% of Americans, I once identified as a coffee drinker.  My day always started off with several mugs of 100% Columbian or Arabica, no sugar, no cream.  I would sip the stuff through the morning until the taste grew a tad sour and my stomach felt a bit dodgy.  That was my cue to steer clear of the coffee pot for the rest of the day.  

Then I stumbled across an article about yaupon tea, the only caffeinated plant native to North America. Yaupon holly is a plant that I thought I already knew.  Here at the ranch, it grows wild nearly anywhere there isn’t a pasture. The birds love the red berries that female yaupon plants produce in the winter.  I did a little more research and decided to make a batch of this tea using the leaves of a vigorous stand of yaupon shrubs sprawled under the canopy of a stately old post oak tree. Those unruly branches were already earmarked for a run-in with the loppers.

Eventually, my tea-making experiment resulted in a dark roasted yaupon brew that tastes smooth, rich, and earthy, with a hint of natural sweetness. I drank cup after cup, and it never got bitter and never upset my stomach.  Maybe I was on to something … I had to know more.  

Besides tasting good, did yaupon tea offer any other wonders?  As I soon learned, yes indeed!  It is packed full of compounds that promote human health.  (You can read about some of those here.)  And equally compelling, it’s a far better choice than coffee or tea from an environmental standpoint. (Read about that here.)  

Learning all of these benefits prompted a eureka moment–perhaps the result of yaupon-induced energy and alertness!  By making this tea we could transform our wild nuisance crop into a healthful product with a higher purpose.  Thus began my Habitat Yaupon journey.  Goodbye coffee, hello yaupon.

I’ll close with this thought:  Let’s imagine a world in which every American coffee drinker switches from coffee to yaupon tea.  Collectively, we could make a positive impact on the health of our ailing planet.