Yerba Mate
| Language: | English |
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WTF
User:Vandebina got us some Mate plants (ilex paraguariensis). Now it's up to us to care for them and make Matelade or selfmade Club-Mate out of it. But for the leaves to be used, they have to be grown and processed.
watering
These plants like to be wet, so water them regulary. Write it down on the sheet of paper when you last watered them and check once a day when you are at the lab if they need to be watered. It seems every 3-4 days will do the trick, but check the earth first. If it's still moist, leave it for another day.
location
They don't like to be burned by the sun all day long, but at our location this isn't possible anyway, so we need to get them as much sun as possible. Currently the plants reside at the window next to the door to the Lounge. This should suffice since they grew a fair bit since they came into the lab (as of 21.5).
processing
To go from raw leaves to refined ready to use tea leaves there are several steps. It's pretty straight forward and it hasn't changed for 200 years, only optimized by machines!
- pick the leaves!
- dry by flame (shock drying)
- shake them inside a woodfire flame (400 Celsius Degrees) for 20-30 seconds
- dry by heat (gentle drying)
- directly after shock drying, dry the leaves for 2-4 hours with indirect heat/hot air (from a fire or other source) which should be about 80 Celsius Degrees
- storage
- this is the tedious part, pack the leaves inside a linensack and store them at a dry (as in humidity) place at room temperature for 6 - 24 MONTHS. You can speed this up if you manage to find a appropriate spot and raise the temperature to 60 Celsius Degrees. Then it only needs one month. Some say the taste suffers from this process.
- milling
- after that you can mill the leaves as fine as you need it and remove all the stems you can find. It seems stems don't actually contribute to the taste.
For some of these steps you need some tools or constructions, look through the sauce links provided below to get a more detailed idea how it works.
sauce
- http://www.mymateworld.com/learnyerbamate.htm
- http://www.redargentina.com/faunayflora/plantas/yerbamate/sapecado.asp
- http://www.latranquera.com.ar/ingles/swf/elaboracion.swf
- http://yerbamate.4t.com/photo3.html
- http://www.allabouttea.co.uk/tea-news-blog/yerba-mate-processing-beginners-guide
- http://www.yerbaytetucangua.com.ar/index.php?mod=8&len=ge
- very interesting: Datei:YerbaMate Chapter 6.pdf
