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You are here: Home / Archives for Brazil

Brazil’s Children of Guarana: Tribe, Legend, Plant

May 11, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

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Want the crème de la crème of guarana? Head to the highlands of the Maués-Açu River basin in Brazil, and seek out the Sateré-Mawé tribe – the foundation of guarana culture.

They domesticated the wild vine and cultivate it as a shrub. The Indians’ care and traditions make theirs the best quality. But they sell less than two tons per year, and like premium winemakers, they retain most of the harvest for their own consumption. Commercial companies nearby also raise guarana, but the quality doesn’t come close to that of the Sateré-Mawé tribe. (Guarana is valued as a natural source of caffeine, and a main ingredient in energy drinks.)

Raising the Children

In November, tribesmen dig up guarana saplings – known as the “children of guarana” – from the forest, and transplant them in dark, highland soils close to their villages, reachable by foot or canoe. They arrange the saplings in pairs, crossing their stems to support their growth, in rows to make an X formation, allowing the saplins room to grow and spread. It takes another two to three years to produce a harvest. If the rains are late, the flowers dry up. The more humidity, the bigger the fruit. Over decades, the tribe has developed a complex knowledge of the genetics, pollination, reproduction and nurturing of the plant, including the effects of fluctuating conditions.

The production process starts with the harvest and runs from October through March (the rainy season). To ensure the best quality, the Sateré-Mawé harvest the guarana bunches before they’re completely ripe. They pluck the seeds from the branch. Then one-by-one and by hand, the seeds are peeled quickly, while they’re most potent and before they ferment. They’re dumped into pots of water to cleanse them of their white pulp, rinsed in running water, and drained.

Preparing Guarana, the Old-Fashioned Way

The seeds are now slow roasted, stirred evenly over the fire so they don’t get puqueca (burned spots). Just as a restaurant kitchen has expert chefs for each stage of a meal, the tribes have expert piladores (seed crushers) and padeiros (bakers) who turn the product into “sticks” – loaves of guarana dough. Skilled women wash the sticks and smooth their surfaces to make them uniform. Finally, the sticks go into fumeiros, smoking areas over low fires, to be dehydrated and blackened. The tribe’s knowledge and attention to detail make their sticks the best in the region.

To drink the guarana, a woman grates the stick with a rock or more likely, the bones of a pirarucu (a large Amazon fish), into a gourd of water. The beverage, known as çapó, is drunk by all ages. It’s used as a daily boost and at ceremonial rituals. Tribesmen consider it an aphrodisiac, though this effect is unsubstantiated. The tannins in the substance are said to aid digestion, and the drink relieves headaches (probably due to the caffeine).

Not much has changed since the first white men encountered the Sateré-Mawé. Father João Felipe Betendorf wrote in 1669 that the tribes have guarana “which they praise like whites praise their gold, and which, grated with a small rock and drunk mixed with water from a gourd, provides them with so great a strength that when the Indians go hunting they do not feel hungry and in addition it makes one urinate and cures fever, headaches and cramps.” [Note: Father Betendorf’s claims have not evaluated by the FDA.]

GuaranaStampkh

The Legend of Guarana

Both the Sateré-Mawé tribe and the plant’s forest saplings are known as the “children of guarana.” This legend explains how the plant was given to the people:

“The contrast of the colors in the split-open fruit gives them the appearance of eyeballs. Indeed, the origin myth behind guarana’s domestication is attributed to the Sateré-Maué Indians of Brazil, the first consumers of the guarana beverage, who tell of a malevolent god who lures into the jungle and kills a beloved village child out of jealousy. The village finds the dead child lying in the forest, and a benevolent god consoles them in their grief with a gift in the form of guarana. The good god plucks out the left eye of the child and plants it in the forest, where it becomes the wild variety of guarana. The right eye is planted in the village garden, where it sprouts and produces fruits resembling the eye of the child, forever after a pleasant reminder of their forever but lost child.” – H.T. Beck, The Cultural History of Plants

As with all legends, variations are plentiful. In one version, the child’s mother is a strong and courageous Indian girl who lives in the forest. Her two lazy brothers are dependent on her and prevent her from marrying, lest they must fend for themselves. The girl becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a boy with intensely beautiful eyes. But the selfish brothers kill the child. Crying and screaming, the girl throws herself over the boy’s body, and to preserve his eyes, she chews the leaves of a magical forest plant and washes the eyes with this mixture of her saliva and plant juices. She plants the eyes in the forest earth, and says “My son, you will be the greatest natural force. You will restore energy to the weak and free them from disease.” And from those eyes grew guarana.

For more on guarana, check out the Guarana Profile in Caffeine Basics.

Visit this site for images of the Sateré-Mawé tribe. and detailed descriptions of the Children of Guarana and how the tribe prepares and consumes guarana. 

Filed Under: Buzz Tagged With: Brazil, caffeine, energy drink, guarana

Coffee Life in Japan: book review

May 4, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

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coffee-life

Everyone knows that coffee houses have been magnets for artists, writers, and political free thinkers throughout history. But in Japan??? The culture where teahouses, matcha, and tea rituals were born?

Wake up to the world of Coffee Life in Japan, a book brimming with surprising tidbits, astute observations, and stories from the heart.

merry-white

Author and cultural anthopologist Merry White knows Japan as only an outsider living on the inside can. She’s written several books on Japan, artfully weaving together social customs, timelines and personal experience.

Coffee Life in Japan reveals 130 years of Japan’s love affair with coffee. It’s a story that includes mass emigrations to Brazil, risqué modern art, “wise women” cafe masters, trade fortunes, modern kissaten cafes, and global trendspotting of Japanese glass siphon machines.

Like a soothsayer reading tea leaves (or coffee grounds), White picks out clues in the minutia of Japanese daily life; then she enlightens us, deciphering what these signs mean about coffee’s impact – past, present and future – not just in Japan, but worldwide as well. I’m fascinated by “what makes people tick” and Coffee Life in Japan gave me enough to go back for second-helpings; I couldn’t absorb everything in just one reading. What fun!

Coffee in Time

I discovered more details about coffee’s impact on modern culture than I had previously imagined, along with events not typically taught in History 101. For instance…

cafe-japan

Japan’s first “coffeehouse master” was Tei Ei-kei, who in 1888 opened Japan’s first coffeehouse, the now famous (and long gone) Kahiichakan. Tei Ei-kei was a Japanese son adopted by a Chinese gentleman, raised in Beijing and Kyoto, and fluent in four languages. He enrolled at Yale University at age sixteen, and developed a taste for coffee in America before dropping out. In London on his journey home, he seized on the model for his coffeehouse: a cushy, club-like salon with Western style and modern appeal. Alas, he was a better dreamer than businessman, and his cafe closed in just five years. Both his first and second wives (who happened to be sisters) died of tuberculosis. After a failed suicide attempt, he started a new life in Seattle, but soon died at the age of 36. Yet even today, coffee fans and industry leaders visit his gravesite there. And in Tokyo, the Sanyo Electric Company honors his legacy – and the importance of coffee – with a brick monument and oversized coffee cup, dedicated to the master on the site of Japan’s first coffeehouse, the Kahiichakan.

barista-japan

Brazil is home to the most people of Japanese-descent (other than Japan itself), in large part because of coffee. And Japan’s people assisted Brazil’s rise to coffee domination. Brazil’s immigrant recruitment policies, coupled with Japan’s economic hardships, led to a win-win relationship. In the 1880s, Japanese laborers were first brought to Brazil to work the coffee plantations and to grow coffee. Waves of workers arrived through the 1970s, especially after the Kanto earthquake in 1923. Some Japanese earned enough to buy land to grow coffee, and others returned home with a taste for coffee. By 1923, Japanese plantations owned 60 million coffee trees in Brazil. A large Japanese coffee chain, Mizuno Ryu’s Cafe Paulista, grew out of this surge, and spread Japanese-grown Brazilian coffee throughout Japan. A national coffee habit was born.

There are other tasty tidbits, too.

• Early Portuguese missionaries and traders introduced Brazilian coffee to Japan. (They also, as I’ve written about at GlobalGourmet.com, introduced deep-fat frying to Japanese cooks, which evolved into fried “tempura” dishes.)

• In the 1990s, white-collar businessmen who had been unceremoniously fired from their jobs would leave for “work” and hide out in cafes, before returning home to their unsuspecting families.

• The Germans warehoused coffee in Yokohama before World War II. During the war, coffee imports into Japan dried up. Faux-coffee drinks were brewed from nuts, soybeans and grains. Towards the war’s end, the Japanese raided and distributed the German coffee to the Japanese army, as part of the national war effort.

White’s focus is on the role that coffee and cafes play in today’s Japanese culture, which is much more nuanced than I’ve recounted here. But these few concrete examples serve as welcoming entry points for Western minds to enter the kissaten, or Japanese cafes, which are found on every block – and unlike Starbucks, are uniquely Japanese in form, function, and feel.

When in Japan: Cups of Culture

Make no mistake: this book is not a travel guide, but as a bonus material it includes White’s “Unreliable Guide” to key cafes. Descriptions entertain even the armchair traveler, like this entry:

Tokyo’s Kafe do Ramburu: “Sekiguchi opened the shop in 1948 using Indonesian beans that had been stored for shipment to Germany before the war. Specializing on old beans (such as Cuban 1974s and Colombian 1989s) roasted to order, Sekiguchi has as idiosyncratic, demanding style and has been called koohiimaniakku (coffee maniac), but the coffee is indeed worth the visit.”

If you’re a koohiimaniakku, clearly Coffee Life in Japan is the must-have book for you.

 

Coffee Life in Japan

by Merry White. Published by University of California Press (2012). California Studies in Food and Culture, Darra Goldstein, Editor. Available as hardcover, paperback and ebook.

 

Filed Under: Buzz, Coffee Tagged With: book review, Brazil, coffee, history, Japan

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Meet Kate

About Kate Heyhoe

I'm an author and journalist specializing in food and cooking. Caffeine Basics is my ninth book. I've written about the U.S. wine industry, international foods, shrinking your "cookprint," and cooking with kids. Great Bar Food at Home was a James Beard Award finalist, and Cooking Green: Reducing … More

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