How Traditional Yerba Mate Tea Became a Popular Caffeinated Energy Drink in a Brightly Colored Can
Video essayist Aidan Hall explained the ancient origins of Yerba Mate while pondering whether or not his daily use of the modern version in a brightly colored can was problematic to his life.
Yerba Mate is a caffeinated tea that comes from the leaves of a plant in South America it's been consumed traditionally in places like Argentina and Paraguay for centuries often as a social drink people pass around a gourd and sip through a straw called a bombila but mine comes out of a tall aluminum can with a vaguely spiritual design printed on the front which feels slightly less legit... The thing is up until now I've never really thought of it as a bad habit to be honest I thought of it as a healthy alternative to what I used to drink.
Hall also explored the history of caffeine, how coffee became the drink of the American Revolution, and how caffeine sparked the Industrial Revolution.
Coffee was literally changing how people thought and it was fueling revolutions. Before 1773, tea was the drink of choice in the colonies. Then came the Boston Tea Party and suddenly tea drinking became unpatriotic, so coffee stepped in. Drinking coffee became a subtle revolt against the British. .. So in a way coffee helped birth America. All of this set the stage for something even bigger: The industrial Revolution
Hall also notes how the energy drink is now synonymous with the rise of the internet.
So if coffee was the drink of the enlightenment and the revolution, then energy drinks are the drink of whatever it is we're doing now. Hustle culture, Twitch streams, gym selfies. I don't know. Whatever era this is, it's running on neon colored cans with names like Bang, Celsius, and Ghost and I don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of energy drinks overlaps almost perfectly with the rise of being online.
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