Coffee prices have you down? Meet North America's own hot brewed pickup: Yaupon tea

Caption

Yaupon holly grows in marginal soils from Virginia to Texas. It is North America's only plant that produces caffeine, which is likely why it has been enjoyed as a tea for hundreds of years.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

Near the end of a lecture this fall, Middle Georgia State University history professor Matt Jennings began wrapping things up in an unusual way.  

 Jennings put one of those big thermoses with a pumping plunger on the desk near where he’d been running through an overview of the Indigenous people of North America around the time of European contact.  

"Now, this morning at 8 o'clock, this was screamingly hot,” he said as he began dosing out a small paper cup‘s worth of what was inside.  

"Maybe what I will do is pour several of these for any student who would like to give it a shot,” he told the students, a few of whom took him up on the offer.  

The liquid in the cup was deep amber and steaming.  One student put his nose close for a sniff before fully committing.  

"It smells like tea,” he said appraisingly. 

That was because what he had in his hand was just that: a tea enjoyed and used for ceremonial purposes by Indigenous people for centuries, maybe even millennia, before coffee or what we think of as traditional tea ever came to this continent, brewed from the leaves of a plant called the yaupon holly. 

Ben Long first met yaupon holly working at a native plant nursery in Florida where it was sold as a landscape plant. For his first tea experiment, he went into the woods to find it in the wild.  

"I went out to forage some, brought it back dried it, roasted it and I was honestly shocked,” Long recalled.  

He was shocked because he said it was a good cup of tea.

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When Long needed a research project for his doctoral program in plant genetics at the University of Georgia, he picked yaupon, which has a scientific name of Ilex vomitoria.  

That's because European colonists maybe paid too much attention to Indigenous purification rituals with a drink in which yaupon tea was likely just one part. When professor Matt Jennings shares yaupon tea with his students, he stresses just how much he isn’t trying to appropriate one of the ceremonial recipes.  

But Indigenous people drank yaupon other times, too, as did colonists before the British trade in Asian tea muscled yaupon out.  

The likely reason yaupon crossed cultures so easily is because it is the only plant native to North America that makes caffeine like coffee.  

"I don't know if you knew this, but coffee is on the IUCN red list," Ben Long said after presenting a wild yaupon shrub in some woods near Athens. “Almost all of the wild genetic diversity of coffee is extinct.” 

That is to say: wild coffee is endangered. Plus, climate change is shrinking the size of the zones where coffee can be farmed.

Meanwhile, half of American adults drink coffee, on average about three cups of it a day. That could mean a lot of people looking for a fix.  

That’s where Ben Long’s research comes in. 

"We've been sitting here on this native, delicious caffeine source for hundreds of years,” he said. “I really wanted to do something — some science that would help elevate this plant into more mainstream culture here in the Southeast.” 

Caption

Yaupon tea was part of Indigenous traditions long before Europeans first came to the South.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

In his corner of a greenhouse on the UGA campus, one can see what he’s up to.  

"So, these are actually the babies — these are the smallest ones that I've collected last year,” he said pointing to flats of barely-there yaupons. The leaves are deep green on top, lighter underneath. Oval shaped with scalloped edges.  

He has older, taller plants out back. They come from Virginia, North and South Carolina, Florida (a yaupon hotspot, he said), Georgia, Texas and even Arkansas. 

"Actually, there's some weird populations up in the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas," Long said.  

That’s the wild distribution. But remember, Long first met yaupon working at a plant nursery. Someone probably planted one not far somewhere locally.  

Some of the plants in Long’s greenhouse he collected. Others were shared with him by other people. With all of them, he is compiling what's called a diversity panel — sort of a genetic roadmap — for yaupon. That means sequencing the genes of each and every plant to better understand which plants make the things we may want to drink.  

"As in, you know, what is the caffeine gene? What forms of the caffeine genes give you more caffeine?” he said.   

Caffeine is really only the start, though. As part of the suite of adaptations to growing in places where other plants may struggle (for example, the caffeine may help young leaves not be eaten by herbivores), yaupon has lots of other stuff that may be good for us, such as antioxidants (which help it survive unremitting sunlight) and even theobromine, the feel-good chemical found in chocolate.  

After the diversity panel is complete, Long said he hopes it provides the way forward to a kind of predictability in flavor and chemical composition for yaupon tea that could help us ease up on the coffee and all its attendant environmental costs.  

"I think that if we could live in a future instead of buying a coffee from, you know, the local cafe, I could get maybe a yaupon tea or a yaupon latte or something, I think that would help relieve a lot of the pressure that these industries are feeling to keep up with this huge demand,” Long said. 

Small companies selling yaupon tea are popping up in lots of states. There's even one in Georgia. Professor Matt Jennings bought the tea he served his students who, the more they drank it, the more they apparently liked it.   

That included Mackenzie Birkett. 

"Like, it’s drinkable,” she said. “I can’t drink black coffee, but I could drink this just as is." 

If plant geneticist Ben Long has his way, one day she may have lots of options to do just that.