Yaupon Holly: The Native Tea the South Forgot

The short answer

Yaupon holly, Ilex vomitoria, is a shrub of the American Southeast whose leaves and twigs contain caffeine. A 2009 paper in Economic Botany introduced it, in its title, as a native North American source of a caffeinated and antioxidant-rich tea. It is a close relative of yerba mate and guayusa, it was brewed and traded across the Southeast for centuries, and until recently almost nobody in the country it is native to drank it.

It is also one of the more badly named plants in the botanical record, and the story of how it got that name is a useful caution about reading old sources.

A holly that makes caffeine

The genus Ilex is the hollies, and three of its members are drunk as stimulant teas. Two of them are South American and well known: Ilex paraguariensis, yerba mate, and Ilex guayusa, guayusa. The third is yaupon, and it grows wild from Virginia down through Florida and west into Texas.

Caffeine in the genus is not evenly distributed, and the question of which North American hollies have it has had some back and forth. A 2005 study in Economic Botany found methylxanthines in both yaupon and its relative dahoon holly, higher in yaupon. A 2019 metabolomics study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry went back with liquid chromatography mass spectrometry and did not corroborate caffeine in dahoon, concluding that yaupon "was the traditional source of the Native North American tea."

You will see yaupon described online as the only caffeinated plant native to North America. That phrasing is repeated widely, including on pages that should know better, and we are not going to use it, because no source we could find actually performs the continent-wide survey that the word "only" would require. What the literature does support is narrower and still remarkable: yaupon is a caffeinated tea plant native to this continent, and on the current evidence it is the one the Southeast actually used.

The white drink

Yaupon was not a casual beverage. Across the Southeast it was prepared as a ceremonial drink, and it still matters to the nations whose drink it is.

The Florida Department of State records that the Apalachee, Creek, Seminole and Muskogee called it the white drink, a name connected to peace and to purity, and that the Apalachee drank it before ball game ceremonies. The word cassina, which turns up in Spanish colonial accounts, is a borrowing from Timucua.

The name most English-language sources use instead is "black drink," which is a colonial term rather than anyone's own. The McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee records its ceremonial use among the Alabama, the Cherokee, the Creek and the Natchez. In some of those contexts the ceremony involved induced vomiting as part of purification, which is documented and was deliberate.

That detail is where the plant's scientific name comes from, and where the record gets misread. Carl Linnaeus's successors attached the epithet vomitoria on the strength of European accounts of those ceremonies. But the plant itself does not appear to be the reason for the vomiting. The historian Christine Folch, writing in Comparative Studies in Society and History in 2021, describes a scientific and medical literature that long mislabeled yaupon as an emetic.

So the correction is narrower than the version that circulates. The vomiting in those ceremonies was real and intended. What was wrong was concluding from it that the plant is an emetic, and then writing that conclusion into its name forever.

We are describing a ceremonial practice here, not explaining how to perform one. It belongs to the nations that hold it.

How far it traveled

The clearest evidence that yaupon moved along trade routes comes from chemistry rather than from written records.

In 2012, Patricia Crown and colleagues published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analysing residues inside pottery from Cahokia, the large Mississippian city near present-day St. Louis, and from smaller sites around it in Illinois. In beaker-shaped vessels dating to roughly A.D. 1050 to 1250 they found theobromine, caffeine and ursolic acid, the chemical signature of Ilex.

Cahokia sits, as the paper puts it, far north of the known range of the holly used to make the drink. The leaves got there, hundreds of miles from where they grow, and someone at Cahokia was brewing them in vessels made for the purpose.

One point worth being precise about, because the two often get conflated: a separate and equally famous residue study at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico found cacao, not holly. A later paper covering eighteen sites in the Southwest could not distinguish between the two. Cahokia is the site where the Ilex finding is clear.

Why nobody drank it, and why that is changing

A native caffeine plant growing abundantly across the South, and the American tea market ran on imported leaves for three centuries. There is no single tidy explanation, though a scientific name announcing that the plant makes you vomit cannot have helped.

That is now reversing. The University of Florida's Gardening Solutions program notes that several companies in Florida are producing yaupon tea commercially, selling it as loose leaf and in bags.

If the pattern interests you, we have written about how purple coneflower became echinacea and about what the agronomy of the Three Sisters actually shows. It is a genuinely unusual situation: a crop with centuries of documented use on this continent, a published chemistry, and an agricultural sector that is only now being built around it.

Common questions

Does yaupon have caffeine?
Yes, in the leaves and twigs. A 2009 study in Economic Botany described the brewed tea as caffeinated and antioxidant-rich.

Is yaupon related to yerba mate?
Closely. Both are in the genus Ilex, the hollies, along with guayusa. Mate and guayusa are South American; yaupon is the North American one.

Will yaupon make you vomit?
The species name comes from European accounts of ceremonies in which vomiting was an intended part of the ritual. Scholarship describes the plant as having been mislabeled an emetic on that basis. If you are considering drinking it, the sensible step is the same as for any unfamiliar plant: check with a clinician first.

What did the nations who used it call the drink?
The Apalachee, Creek, Seminole and Muskogee called it the white drink. "Black drink" is a colonial term. "Cassina" comes from Timucua.

Where does yaupon grow?
Through the coastal plain of the Southeast, roughly Virginia to Florida and west into Texas. It is also a common landscape shrub.

Can you buy yaupon tea?
Yes. Several companies in Florida and elsewhere in the Southeast now produce it commercially. We do not make or sell it.

Sources

Crown PL, Emerson TE, Gu J, Hurst WJ, Pauketat TR, Ward T. Ritual Black Drink consumption at Cahokia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 109, no. 35, 2012, pp. 13944 to 13949. View source

Negrin A, Long C, Motley TJ, Kennelly EJ. LC-MS Metabolomics and Chemotaxonomy of Caffeine-Containing Holly (Ilex) Species and Related Taxa in the Aquifoliaceae. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, vol. 67, no. 20, 2019, pp. 5687 to 5699. View source

UF/IFAS Gardening Solutions, University of Florida. Yaupon Holly Tea. View source

Folch, Christine. Ceremony, Medicine, Caffeinated Tea: Unearthing the Forgotten Faces of the North American Stimulant Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria). Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 63, no. 2, 2021, pp. 464 to 498. View source

Hudson, Charles M., editor. Black Drink: A Native American Tea. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979. View source

Palumbo MJ, Talcott ST, Putz FE. Ilex vomitoria Ait. (Yaupon): A Native North American Source of a Caffeinated and Antioxidant-Rich Tea. Economic Botany, vol. 63, no. 2, 2009, pp. 130 to 137. View source

This article is historical and educational and is not medical advice. Of The Ancients does not make or sell yaupon products. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.