Americans love caffeine, but few realize just how ancient the North American craving for caffeine truly is. North Americans have been enthusiastically quaffing caffeinated beverages since before the Boston Tea Party, before the English founded Jamestown, and before Columbus landed in the Americas. That is to say: North Americans discovered caffeine long before Europeans “discovered” North America.
Cassina, or black drink, the caffeinated beverage of choice for indigenous North Americans, was brewed from a species of holly native to coastal areas from the Tidewater region of Virginia to the Gulf Coast of Texas. It was a valuable pre-Columbian commodity and widely traded. Recent analyses of residue left in shell cups from Cahokia, the monumental pre-Columbian city just outside modern-day St. Louis and far outside of cassina’s native range, indicate that it was being drunk there. The Spanish, French, and English all documented American Indians drinking cassina throughout the American South, and some early colonists drank it on a daily basis. They even exported it to Europe.
As tea made from a species of caffeinated holly, cassina may sound unusual. But it has a familiar botanical cousin in yerba maté, a caffeine-bearing holly species from South America whose traditional use, preparation, and flavor is similar. The primary difference between cassina and maté is that while maté weathered the storm of European conquest, cassina has fallen into obscurity.
Today it’s better known as yaupon, and it’s mostly planted as an ornamental throughout the southeastern United States. Recent years have seen a handful of small-scale growers selling and promoting cassina for consumption, typically under the name yaupon tea. Cafes in a few scattered Southern locales are selling it and pushing for a revival.
This is not the first call for a reappraisal. For over a century, botanists, historians, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture have periodically drawn attention to the absurdity of cassina’s disuse in its native land.
So why was a plant of such well documented potential, which seemingly should have developed into a domestic alternative to expensive tea and coffee imports, ignored for so long? What happened to cassina?
Over the years, cassina has gone by many names. But just one gave the tea a permanent black eye that diminished its commercial prospects for centuries.