How Can I Enjoy Yerba Mate Buds?

However you want!

Brew it hot and let it chill or cold steep it leaving the buds in the pitcher over night. I once cold steeped the buds over night and put a lilac flower in the water as well. The flavor was beautiful. Any way you prepare it, the brew is refreshing, energizing, and a beautiful deep green.

Preparing it hot is probably the easiest way to enjoy yerba mate buds. The liquor is deep green, the aroma is strong and yet subtle, and the taste speaks for itself.

The big flavors and hefty mouthfeel of yerba mate buds allows for limitless flavor combinations. Above are chamomile flowers, dried rose buds, a chai mixture (with cinnamon, cardamom pods, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice), and dried hibiscus flowers. The strong taste of the buds allows for mixing with smooth, cooling, spicy, floral, and sweet flavors. Try your own and let us know how it went!

Simply a detail of the buds and the liquor. Is that not the greenest green in a additive free drink?

The Complete Leaf Company

The Complete Leaf Company started with an idea, a belief, and a dream.

The idea is that unique and artisanal products improve our lives and strengthen our bodies and souls. In a sense, that a hand crafted product is alive in that it has a singular composition and backstory. Use of such products is richer when one can perceive, ever so slightly, the botanical miracle of domesticated agriculture and the effort and care the farmer and craftsperson put into what is essentially his or her life’s work. It is recognizing the beauty of the human touch.

The belief is bolder, that business can be done in such a way that only positive impacts are left behind. This means addressing carbon output, sourcing renewable and biodegradable packaging, and using land wisely. It means observing sustainable farming practices and just production policies. It also means forming relationships with our partners that are more than mere transactions. Beyond production it is honoring the first peoples to cultivate the soil and protecting the ecosystems that offered us their bounty. It is leaving a fingerprint instead of a footprint.

The dream is that the idea and the belief will catch hold and become contagious. That they will infect our consciousness and become part of our lives. That a difference will be made simply because we opened our eyes, minds, and hearts as wide as we could and looked around at ourselves, each other, our communities, and this Earth and asked ourselves what is really important. It is about more than the Complete Leaf and a dream, it is about the complete life.

We hope to use Yerba Mate Buds to make this dream a reality by putting into practice each idea elaborated above whether it is a dedication of a portion of every sale to Survival International, a human rights NGO that fights for the last Guaraní in Brazil and other small tribes in Paraguay or our efforts to include our Paraguayan partners in the the development of this project and the benefits of it. Eventually the website will give a thorough overview of the company and the product.

The tradition of Yerba Mate

I see a lot of talk on the web about legends and myths about yerba maté and what it means to the people that drink it. How have they come up with a single narrative for a product that is the drink of choice of Chilean fishermen, Brazilian farmers, Argentine bankers, and Paraguayan indigenous groups?

a farmer resting between lines of just sprouted beans he is hoeing

a señora taking a break between chores

relatively affluent teenagers drink a mid-day tereré to beat the heat between classes

Yerba has been consumed since prehistory, originally by the Tupi-Guaraní peoples of the Atlantic Rainforest. Yerba was traded over vast distances, crossing forbidding territory to enter the distribution system of the Incan Empire (the maté, is derived from the Quechua word mati, meaning gourd). The leaf was chewed or dried by hand over an open flame, aged, and ground in a wooden pestle. It was consumed out of a gourd with a bamboo and fiber straw. The semi-nomadic Tupi-Guaraní occasionally packed up to leave, prepared corn kernels, beans, mandioca cuttings, and other seeds and set out for more fertile land, knowing that with their intimate knowledge of the forest, they would locate more native wild yerba trees. They even used over 50 forest plants to create an Ayurveda-like system of medicine known as Pohã.

a spread of the medicinal herbs available in almost any plaza in the cities of Paraguay

Then the Spanish arrived. In Jesuit missions, the labor of converted Guaraní indians was utilized to industrialize and export the leaf as it became a basic staple in the growing port of Buenos Aires. In the 19th and 20th centuries, German immigration to Southern Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina brought another increase in efficiency. Today, most factories are largely automated, a labyrinth of conveyor belts and electric motors accompanied by a few people. The leaf is consumed out of leather wrapped gourds, carved wooden cups, metal mugs and even hollowed out cow horns.

a variety of different cups for drinking both mate (hot) and tereré (cold)

The one uniting feature is the bombilla, the metal filter straw. A Brazilian will mix fruit juice with his yerba, an Argentine some mint leaves or chamomile. A Paraguayan will put any number of plants into their yerba from native all-stars like lemon verbena and stevia (sweet leaf), to roots, barks, vines, and weeds from what is left of the forest.

Yes, yerba is rich in tradition. But it is this way because it is constantly evolving and synthesizing its own tradition. So rather than try and drink yerba like a forest dweller or a Carioca (Rio de Janeiro dweller), drink the leaf for the sake of yourself and figure out what it means to you and noone else.

The Founder

Enough of the third person passive voice. My name is Andrew Wilcox, and I have started the Complete Leaf and am bringing to market a yerba product that I developed while in the Peace Corps living in a tree house in rural Paraguay. The development of both Complete leaf as an enterprise and Yerba Mate Buds as a product spent around two years incubating while I made relationships with people I may never have known and I learned about things I never imagined I would have the opportunity to (the guaraní language, tropical botany, and small-scale agriculture).

I left for Paraguay May 29th, a year to the day after I graduated from college. Luckily, my assignment brought me to the east of the country near Ciudad del Este in a small Paraguayan colony in the heart of what was formerly the vast Atlantic Rainforest. My colleagues were to be members of a small cooperative that produced yerba maté but whose factory had burned down the year prior. In the following months, during weekly afternoon meetings, we planned and wrote a grant to USAID to rebuild our charred barbacuá and resume production. That year we raised production from just under one ton to just under 25 tons. I worked almost every night from 4 in the afternoon when a few tons of the fresh leaf would arrive until about 1 in the morning when we would wrap everything up and leave the semi-dried leaf to slowly dry overnight in our new barbacuá oven.

planting parsley seeds with the kids

At this point, my mind starting wandering about how to share this unique beverage that I drank at least 3-4 times a day as maté (hot) and tereré (cold). I was very interested by the mechanics of the market and also the fact that yerba cannot be grown anywhere but around the Paraná river. I had always thought of global commodities as the enemy of the small scale farmer due to their price fluctuations and (usually) high and costly chemical inputs. Yerba seemed the opposite, it was native to Paraguay, could be integrated into agroforestry systems, can't be mechanized, and needed very little fertilizer and pesticide.

As I clocked into the factory, I started to notice an odd inefficiency in the market for fresh yerba leaves: all parts of the plant were created equal, the tenderest leaves and the woodiest stems received the same price. Meanwhile, I had been doing a lot of research into tea (camellia sinensis) production and had been learning about its cultivation and processing. On top of that, I noticed that the majority of the yerba offered in the United States was somehow masked with mint, rooibos, or some other additive, or was sold as a flavored extract. Also this product that I thought of in terms of cents per kilogram was being sold for around ten dollars a pound!

With all of this swirling around in my head, I began to think of treating the yerba plant as tea is treated in Asia. Planting it at higher densities, classifying the production, and using hands instead of machines for processing. At this point, serendipity struck. I went to Iguazu Falls for the weekend and while checking out of the hotel, spotted the Argentine National Yerba Institute's 2008 report on the study of yerba maté. This tome provided all the confirmation I would need to begin making this idea into a reality: studies regarding high density plantations, bitterness in the buds vs the leaves, the frequency of bud sprouting, and even the viability of steaming the leaf. For my birthday in October, I decided to head to Posadas, Argentina to visit the Yerba Institute in person where they provided me with a wealth of materials regarding yerba maté.

Getting to know the country on a 400 kilometer raft trip down the Paraná river

I spent a large portion of the next few months in the yerbal, the yerba field, studying the plants, harvesting buds, and testing out various processing methods based on what I had learned about green tea processing in William Ukers' All About Tea, the definitive technical text on tea production. A few months earlier I had started working with a group of women who wanted to find a value-add project they could do. Once I convinced them that forming a cooperative would be a good idea, we became a perfect fit. This past February we came together and using a prototype factory, produced the very first batch of yerba maté buds in the world. Today I am using this product to conduct taste-tests and other preliminary market testing to see if this project is viable.

Sunset at Ñacunday Falls

Our Product

The Complete Leaf Company proudly presents for the very first time Yerba Mate Buds. The product, derived solely from the buds of the plant, leaving the stems, branches, and mature leaves for conventional production, will be the first to offer a truly unique taste experience worth savoring. By applying an ancient Chinese processing technique to yerba, consumers will finally be able to skip the bitterness of crudely processed traditional yerba maté and enjoy the delicate and complex flavors of yerba maté at its best. Below is a close-up of the Yerba Mate Buds:



The Complete Leaf Company's Yerba Mate Buds will be truly and literally unique. It will be the first bud-derived yerba product, the first to have whole, unbroken leaves, the first handcrafted yerba product, and the first to come in pyramidal tea sachets. The comparison below (with Brazilian style Chimmarão on the right and Argentine style yerba maté on the left) clearly and powerfully demonstrates exactly how different Complete Leaf's product will be:


Upon steeping, the yerba buds revert back to their vibrant green color. The liquor is clear and greenish green, not opaque and yellowish brown like traditional maté. The smell and taste is similar to green tea but distinctly and uniquely 'yerba-y'. Below is a side by side comparison of Complete Leaf Yerba Mate Buds (left) alongside that of a competitor (right) offering traditional yerba maté:


Below is a photo of The Complete Leaf Company's Yerba Mate Buds in a mesh infuser brewing:


A comparison of Complete Leaf Yerba Mate Buds (right) alongside that of the competition before and after steeping the two:


A stem from the yerba plant alongside a cup with dry budset yerba in it:



That same cup after steeping. The delicate buds have soaked up the hot water, gently unfurled, and reverted to their original shape and color:



Lastly, a sight one will never find in any other yerba in the world, an unbroken delicate interior leaf from a yerba bud after steeping:


What follows in the next posts are descriptions and depictions of the products our competitors offer, our processing methods, traditional processing methods, our raw material, and finally the plant itself.

Our Raw Material

The first fragile yerba buds to emerge in the Spring. These tiny leaves and the growing meristem produce a beverage of delicate, complex, and sophisticated taste. The Complete Leaf Company intends to execute a complete paradigm shift in the cultivation, harvest, and production of yerba maté by focusing on these tiny tips of the plant:


A side view of the buds. Complete leaf will use the buds up to the first leaf that bends away from the axis of the stem:


The crown of a principal branch of the plant. Upon its second flush, the branch opens up into a crown of roughly fifty buds, all appropriate for harvest to make Budset Yerba:


Shown below is a simple contrast between the raw material of our competitors and that of Complete Leaf Budset Yerba. An important point, not clearly depicted below, is that material for conventional yerba includes branches up to the diameter of a thumb and leaves up to 12 inches long, whereas our buds will be no longer than an inch with between 7-10 tiny leaves packed into the bud:


The photograph below shows the stark contrast in color, texture, and, ultimately, in taste between the mature leaves of the plant and the growing bud:


Another shot of an emerging bud in the late Spring:


The following photo, taken in early Spring demonstrates a classic characteristic of tropical plants, the reddish color upon sprouting that signifies that the tender buds have yet to produce chlorophyll:


A view from above a bud showing the tight concentric circles of new leaf formation:


Bringing to yerba a strict regimen of classification will enable the production of a beverage of such quality as to be able to compete successfully with green tea. University studies in Brazil show that the points of the branches, the buds, produce a beverage much smoother and less bitter than products derived from branches and old leathery leaves.

Their Production

The yerba tree below will yield about 7 kilograms of leaves, branches, and stems. Rip all of that off of that plant and about 1,000 others, and the raw material is ready to be transported to the factory:


After leaving the field, the life of the yerba begins anew in the factory. Factories tend to have a processing capacity anywhere between 5,000 and 20,000 kilograms per day and are highly mechanized. The Complete Leaf Budset Yerba will be processed by hand, producing around 200 kilograms a day, ensuring the most care in crafting the highest quality product.


The leaf is first elevated and drops into the smoky maw of the sapecador, a rotating metal drum with an intense fire on the entry side of the tube:


The leaf passes through the smoke and is flash-fired, reducing the water content of the leaf by around half:


A view of the leaf's entry into the rotating drum:


A view into the tube from the exit side. The leaf is lifted and bruised as it passes through the slightly inclined drum exiting after around 5 minutes:


The leaf is then lifted onto the Barbacua, a wooden structure under which a conduit leads to another large fire. The leaf is essentially smoked for 24 hours as its water content is reduced to near zero:


Upon exiting the Barbacua, the leaf is coarsely ground and left in a warehouse to age for at least a year (although Brazilians prefer their yerba to be fresh, foregoing the aging process). After one to two years the yerba is taken out of the warehouse and finely ground producing the final product that is shown below and is utilized by virtually all yerba purveyors.


The paradox of the yerba industy is that a ¢60 per kilo industrialized product is often sold as a traditional hand-crafted product for upwards of $30 per kilo. The Complete Leaf Company will provide a product that lives up to such high expectations and price points.

The Plant

Yerba Maté goes by many names, erva mate, Ilex Paraguariensis, Ka'a, all depending on who one asks (Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Guaraní, respectively). The tree only grows in one environment in the world with exactly zero successful commercial plantations outside of its habitat: the Paraná-Paraguay river system watershed:


Yerba is a member of the holly family, aquifoliaceae, and is found in the secondary canopy of the Atlantic Rainforest, a jungle that once covered much of eastern South America. Growing up to 15 meters, below is a photo of a wild yerba tree in its virgin habitat (the yerba is in the very center of the picture):


A wild female plant in bloom in the Spring:


When cultivated, the tree takes on the appearance of a bush more than a tree. In commercial plantations in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, the plant density is usually 1000-2000 trees per hectare. Below is an example of a domesticated yerba plant, when harvested it will yield between five and ten kilograms of material for harvest:


Traditionally, the harvest includes stripping the tree of all its branches, leaves, stems and buds. This crude raw material is trucked to the factory and processed using a method created by the Spanish Jesuits in the 17th Century. The product of ten trees would look very similar to this:


Below is what we at Complete Leaf Company believe the product of 10 plants should look like: