Yaupon Holly and the South’s Forgotten Tea Culture

In the summer, we crave iced coffees, frozen margaritas, fruit smoothies – anything refreshing to combat the Southern heat. However, in this article we will discuss a hot, caffeinated beverage that would cause Native Americans to vomit. Sound appetizing? Read on.

Native American Delicacy?

As early as 8,000 years ago, the Timucua Native Americans of Southeast Georgia and Northeast Florida consumed “cassina,” a dark-colored drink they made by roasting and boiling the leaves of the yaupon holly bush. The yaupon is North America’s only known native caffeinated plant. It is indigenous to the Southeastern United States, from Virginia down the Atlantic Coast to Florida and along the Gulf of Mexico to West Texas.

Almost every Native American tribe who lived among the yaupon – the Creek, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Apalachee, in addition to the Timucua – drank this tea, but there is evidence other farther-flung tribes consumed it, too. Recent analysis of residue in shell cups from Cahokia, the monumental pre-Columbian city outside St. Louis, indicate the Native Americans consumed it there, far outside cassina’s native range.

Although the Native Americans consumed cassina as an everyday, energizing beverage, Timucua warriors may have believed the holly leaf’s caffeine and antioxidants also gave them strength and energy before the hunt and battle. In addition, they commonly associated yaupon with purification and incorporated it into men’s-only rituals. The men sat in a circle, sung or chanted, and took turns chugging and then throwing up hot cassina to – they believed – cleanse the body and mind and help them make important decisions. However, yaupon does not have emetic properties so historians believe the Timucua mixed in other herbs or simply drank such huge volumes of yaupon on an empty stomach that it could have induced vomiting.

Following the Trend

Spanish settlers adopted the consumption of what they called the “black drink,” as well. In fact, residents of Spanish St. Augustine drank it to such an extent that in his 1615 chronicles of New World medicinal plants, botanist Francisco Ximenez noted, “Any day that a Spaniard does not drink it, he feels he is going to die.”

By the time of the American Revolution, colonials grew yaupon on their farms, consumed it widely in towns across the South, and traded it to Europe, where it was popular in London and Paris. However, by the 1780s the British East India Company deemed this alternative to traditional black tea a threat to their control of the tea market and limited its importation into Europe.

…Ilex What?

In a further blow to yaupon’s popularity, in 1789 the superintendent of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, under George III gave yaupon its controversial scientific name, Ilex vomitoria, which roughly translates to “holly that induces vomiting.” While some believe this name reflected yaupon’s ritual consumption among Native Americans, others believe it was a politically motivated smear campaign to further quash yaupon’s threat to the English tea trade. Whatever the motivation, this name tainted yaupon’s reputation and instilled a lasting fear of its side effects.

By the mid-1800s, yaupon’s popularity in the United States had declined, as it became associated with poor, rural communities who could not afford to import traditional Chinese tea. The plant’s connection to Native American communities also diminished; tribes were either wiped out or relocated to regions where yaupon did not grow. While yaupon ceremonies have persisted within some Native American tribes, such as the Cherokee, and the beverage maintained popularity along isolated coastal areas in North Carolina, the tea became largely forgotten in the United States by the 1860s.

A Tradition Revived

In the 2010s, interest in the tea revived when planters established Catspring Yaupon outside Austin, Texas, in 2013, and the Yaupon Brothers launched their brand in Edgewater, Florida, in 2015. Today, small-scale farmers and entrepreneurs of the American Yaupon Association are harvesting, roasting, and selling more than 10,000 pounds of yaupon each year, and the drink’s popularity continues to grow.

Now available for purchase in specialty food stores such as Yaupon Teahouse in Savannah and even on Amazon, perhaps now is the time for cassina to make its big break. Will you be in on the movement?

Want to learn more about cassina and the Timucua? Join our Cumberland Island Walking Tour: Haunting Ruins and Wild Horses or our St. Marys Fugitives, Fighters, and Fudge Tour!