A New Old Drink · Est. Austin, TX

Giddy
Up.

A naturally caffeinated tea brewed from wild Texas yaupon — the only caffeinated plant native to North America.

Caffeine 35–200mg
Ingredients Three. That's the list.
Roots 1,000+ years
Read on ↓
§ 01 · The Drink

A leaf older than the idea of Texas.

A cowboy seated under a yaupon plant, drinking a cup of yaupon tea as the sun sets over a Hill Country ridge — hand-drawn illustration in deep olive on cream.

In Texas, Yaupon grows wild from Galveston Bay through the Hill Country and out to the Pineywoods. Light-roasted, it's grassy and clean — like fresh hay and Hill Country air. Dark-roasted, it's malty and round, almost cocoa-leaning.

Either way, no tannins, no bitterness.

The caffeine, paired with naturally occurring theobromine (the same lift you get from chocolate), arrives differently than coffee. Steady. Even. No spike, no crash.

Which is to say: it's the kind of drink you can have at lunch and still sleep that night, but at 3pm and not crash before five, in the truck on the way home, or on a porch as the sun goes down. A cup made for a long, slow afternoon.

1k+
Years of documented use, beginning long before European contact
0
Tannins. Naturally never bitter, no matter how long it sits.
3×
Antioxidant load comparable to green tea, in every cup
§ 02 · The Lineup

Three brews. One leaf.

A morning cold brew with the kick of a coffee. An everyday daily-drinker. And one for those who want the leaf and nothing else.

No. 01 ~200mg
Cold Brew
Yaupon · Texas Honey

Cold Brew

16oz

Slow-steeped overnight, brewed strong. Coffee-level caffeine — without the bitterness.

~200mg Lightly sweet 10g sugar
No. 02 ~35mg
Daily
The Everyday Brew

Daily

16oz

The hero. A balanced, clean-brewed yaupon you can reach for any time of day without thinking.

~35mg Light Texas honey 4g sugar
No. 03 ~35mg
Unsweet
Just the Leaf

Unsweet

16oz

For those who already know what yaupon tastes like — and don't want anything in the way.

~35mg No sweetener 0g sugar
§ 03 · Inside the Can

No flavor system. No "natural flavor." Three things.

The label is the whole list.

01
Wild Yaupon
02
Texas Honey
03
Spring Water
01
Wild Yaupon Holly Leaf
Cat Spring & Lost Pines, TX
Wild-harvested or regenerative organic certified. Hand-cut, slow-roasted in small batches. The only caffeinated plant native to North America.
02
Texas Wildflower Honey
Hill Country Apiary
Single-source, raw, unfiltered. Used in trace amounts in our Daily and Cold Brew. Our Unsweet has none.
03
Texas Spring Water
Hill Country Aquifer
Drawn from a single Hill Country spring. Filtered, never treated. The only thing we take from the land that isn't the leaf itself.
§ 04 · Where to Find Us

Austin first. Then everywhere we belong.

We're starting where the leaf grows — Austin's specialty grocers and corner markets, by hand, by relationship.

Phase 01 · Now Austin specialty
Phase 02 Central Market & H-E-B
Phase 03 Whole Foods, Sprouts & beyond
01
Swedish Hill
South Congress · Austin
02
Royal Blue Grocery
Multiple · Austin
03
Tiny Grocer
East Austin
04
Wheatsville Co-op
North Loop · Austin
05
Thom's Market
Riverside · Austin
1528
§ 05 · The Story

A drink that didn't disappear. It was removed.

For at least a thousand years, yaupon was the caffeinated drink of the people on this land. Then it vanished — not gradually, and not by accident. We're paying it forward.

Long before the United States, before Texas was a word, before the cattle drives or the railroads or the wells, this was the caffeinated drink of the people who lived here. The Karankawa on the coast. The Caddo to the east. The Tonkawa, the Tawokanis, the Asinai. They roasted the leaves, brewed them in clay, and shared the cup.

The first European to write it down was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, shipwrecked on Galveston Island in 1528. He watched the Karankawa brew yaupon "as hot as they can stand." It traveled too — pottery from Cahokia, a thousand-year-old city outside St. Louis, still carries the chemical fingerprint of yaupon leaves traded north along ancient routes.

European colonists picked it up almost immediately. By the 1700s, yaupon — they called it "cassina" or "Carolina tea" — was on breakfast tables across the South. A Spanish priest in 1615 wrote that any day a man missed his cup, "he feels that he is going to die."

"For those who know what to look for, what was once the most widely consumed caffeinated beverage in the Americas comes from a plant growing in plain sight."

— BBC, 2024

Then it vanished. The Trail of Tears moved the people who grew up with yaupon to lands where it doesn't grow. The British East India Company, which had a tea monopoly to protect, lobbied to have the plant slandered with the name Ilex vomitoria — "the holly that makes you spew" — even though it does no such thing. By 1900 it was almost gone.

Now we make a drink from it again. We don't pretend that's a simple thing.

Karankawa Caddo Tonkawa Tawokanis Asinai (Tejas) Timucua Creek Cherokee Chickasaw

The peoples whose relationship with this leaf made our work possible.

§ 06 · The Promise

We didn't invent this drink We're just paying it forward.

A meaningful share of every can will go to Indigenous-led organizations doing language preservation, land stewardship, and food-sovereignty work — beginning in Texas.

Our giveback work is rooted in direct partnerships with the Karankawa Kadla, the Caddo Nation, and the Tonkawa Tribe — three of the peoples whose ancestors brewed this leaf for a thousand years before us. The path forward there is theirs to set, not ours.

We're actively exploring sourcing relationships with leaf producers carrying the Intertribal Agriculture Council's "Made / Produced by American Indians" trademark — a USPTO-registered mark traceable to federally-recognized Tribal producers. If we can build that into our supply chain, it becomes part of the label.

We'd like to see yaupon recognized on the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste — a registry of foods tied to specific places and traditional knowledge, at risk of disappearing without active stewardship. If we can be useful in that nomination, we'd like to be.

None of this is decided yet. We're writing it down so you can hold us to it as we figure it out — and so you can tell us what we're missing.

A quiet launch. The first cans go to the people on this list.

We're brewing in small batches. Drop your email and we'll let you know exactly when and where you can find a can.