Giddy Up — Texas's First Caffeine

§ 01 · The Drink

A leaf older than the idea of Texas.

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.

You can get your day started with a cold brew, sip on one in the truck on the way home, or on a porch as the sun goes down. A drink for whatever comes your way.

1k+

Years of documented use, beginning long before European contact

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.

Cold Brew

4 × 12oz

Slow-steeped overnight, brewed strong. Coffee-level caffeine with no bitterness.

~200mg Lightly sweet 4g sugar

Daily

4 × 12oz

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

~35mg Light Texas honey 10g sugar

Unsweet

4 × 12oz

For those who want the untouched yaupon flavor.

~35mg No sweetener 0g sugar

§ 03 · Inside the Can

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

The label is the whole list.

Wild Yaupon

Texas Honey

Spring Water

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.

Texas Wildflower Honey

Hill Country Apiary

Single-source, raw, unfiltered. Used in trace amounts in our Daily and Cold Brew. Our Unsweet has none.

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.

1528

§ 04 · 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.

Giddy
Up.

A leaf older than the idea of Texas.