Everything old is brew again
Young entrepreneur rediscovers, harvests and sells cassina, the original Texas tea
A young entrepreneur is hoping to bring back cassina, which has been used for centuries and is known as the original Texas tea.
VICTOR Gonzales emerged from the thicket dragging a 15foot branch, blood trickling down his shin. “I didn’t even feel it,” he said, though he was too tired to laugh.
The 23-year-old from Kingwood and a crew of four other young men had hiked back into the woods on a small farm in New Caney, northwest of Houston. They were foraging for yaupon holly, a tall, shrublike plant native to this part of the world.
Deep in the woods, Led Zeppelin blared from a speaker in a backpack, John Bonham’s bass drum as heavy as the thud of Barrett Schulze’s ax as he cracked into the plant. Tugging at T-shirts that were sticking to their skin, Gonzales and the other men lugged the branches out to a clearing and lopped them down to size. It was tedious, sweaty work. Eventually, they’d haul away about 40 pounds of it, which they’d use to make an emerald-green drink called cassina. Cassina, the Spanish name for “black drink,” has been used socially, medicinally and ritually by indigenous people throughout what is now the American South for
centuries, if not longer. It is the only source of caffeine native to this part of the world. Among other uses, the Creek Indians prepared cassina (along with tobacco) for important visitors. It was a social lubricant. Karankawa men, Texas explorer Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca observed in the 1500s, ceremoniously drank cassina “as hot as they can stand.”
But you’ve probably never heard of cassina. Why don’t we still drink it?
The answer is complicated. The late Charles Hudson, who wrote a book on cassina, argued that as white Europeans imported coffee, tea and chocolate, cassina was simply outperformed. But genocide and the forced displacement of indigenous people who knew cassina contribute to that marginalization, too. The Trail of Tears moved people where yaupon doesn’t grow, and cassina was largely erased, almost forgotten.
Now, Nick Panzarella, 26, is hoping to bring it — and this complicated cultural history — back.
He’s been experimenting with cassina since he was a kid. A voracious reader and an Eagle Scout, he grew up in Kingwood, riding his bike on the Greenbelt, trails that snake through the master-planned community. Those are thick with yaupon, he says. “It was one of the first plants I could identify because it’s so common.”
He once met another Scout who said he brewed cassina from it. Panzarella was horrified.
The unappetizing Latin name for yaupon is Ilex vomitoria — perhaps because historical accounts, including Cabeza de Vaca’s, often mention its use in ceremonies that involved ritual vomiting.
“Dude,” Panzarella remembers telling the Scout, “you’ll vomit if you drink that.”
“No,” the other Scout assured him. “It tastes like regular tea.”
So it does, Panzarella found out. He started reading more and researching the plant in foraging textbooks. So common as to be considered a nuisance, yaupon lacks tannins, the compounds that cause tea’s bitterness. Besides the caffeine, an obvious perk, it’s loaded with antioxidants, he learned.
Then he tried brewing it. “I couldn’t get the taste right,” he said. “But I thought there was a chance.”
It wasn’t until years later — after Panzarella studied linguistics in college in New Orleans, after he moved away from the U.S. — that the idea to start a cassina business took hold.
Traveling in Italy, he encountered the slowfood movement, which emphasizes the native, the local, the seasonal. Our food should be prepared by hand in a kitchen, the thinking went, not processed by a machine in a facility.
Panzarella was an easy convert. Agriculture’s in his blood: His uncle is John Panzarella, the citrus guru whose jampacked Lake Jackson yard is said to contain the largest private citrus collection in Texas. “Fruits would taste so good at my uncle’s house,” Panzarella said, “and they would never taste as good anywhere else.”
While in Italy, he told a German friend about yaupon, how abundant it was in Texas, how it was local, always in season.
The friend told him about Club-Mate, a soda made with yerba mate, a yauponlike plant native to Argentina. It’s become one of the most popular drinks in Germany. “If we drink that,” the friend said, “they’ll drink yaupon in Texas.”
Panzarella returned to Houston, and in 2015 he launched Wild South Tea.
Now, every few weeks, he, Gonzales, Schulze and his crew gather at his uncle’s farm in New Caney. They hike back into the woods and look for yaupon, which can grow up to 30 feet tall. It has a smooth, gray bark and diamond-shaped leaves.
Working for a few hours, they forage as many as 100 pounds, which they drive away in a U-Haul to an old house near downtown Humble. There, they strip the leaves from the branches and lay them out to dry.
Those leaves are then transported to a commercial kitchen in the Near Northside, where they’re brewed and bottled.
The result is subtle. At least as Panzarella brews it, cassina has a woodsy flavor and a velvety-smooth finish. The caffeine content, comparable to green tea, doesn’t create any jitters.
Panzarella isn’t the only one marketing cassina in Texas. Abianne Falla, a Houston native, does something similar almost 100 miles west on old family property in Cat Spring. A co-founder of CatSpring Yaupon, she sells loose-leaf tea wholesale and to grocery stores and restaurants in Austin and San Antonio.
Her interest was piqued when yaupon was the one plant on the property that survived the drought in 2010.
“We were losing 100-year-old oak trees,” she remembers. “Everything looked wilted and brown, except for the yaupon. We were intrigued. We did some research, and we uncovered this legacy.”
But is there something funny about making a business out of that legacy and selling it for $8 a package or $4 a bottle?
Panzarella wrestles with the question. “It’s something we’ve struggled with, with the product,” he says. “The average consumer might not think that deeply. But there are two ways I’m looking at it. One is a vague way of getting permission from living native people or finding some way to collaborate.
“And another is where you just give away money. One yaupon company donates proceeds to the American Indian College Fund. I don’t like that at all. You could argue that that is further erasing native culture.
“We’re thinking now about some kind of arts program that culminates in a film contest. The big point of each film is that it would have to have language in a native tongue.” Here, Panzarella cites his work with Wikitongues, a nonprofit attempting to record every language that’s still in existence in the world.
“And the hope is that, if we get bigger, people would ask questions about it.”
Back at the farm, walking to the woods, Panzarella rattles off the names of plants, their uses, their histories. He spots a wild passion fruit and snatches it. “It’s not bad,” he says. As the men joke their way through the work, he stands in the clearing, using a lopper to snip the huge branches down to a size he can work with.
Later, they toss the bundles into the U-Haul and get ready to head back to Humble. “Yolo!” he whoops. He laughs, as though it’s just the caffeine speaking: You Only Live Once.
But he means it, too: You do only live once. So you’d best take a big swig of the life that’s around you.