If you ended up here it is for an obvious reason: you want to learn how to prepare your mate correctly. Keep calm, you are in the right place. We are going to tell you some things that are key so pay attention.
The first thing you are going to do is choose your mate. If you are reading this, you may have never had a mate before, therefore, you have to choose one. Nowadays in the matero market there is a lot of variety but we recommend so as to live the 100% the mate experience, to buy a gourd (criollo). By the way we leave you this article that tells you how to how and why we cure the mate.
Steps to prepare your mate
The first thing you are going to do is place the yerba inside the coup, it would be about 3/4 parts.
Then you are going to slowly incline the mate to accommodate the yerba so that it is at about 45 degrees. You can place your hand covering the hole in your mate to make sure you don’t lose any yerba.
In the space that was left free, like a hole, we are going to place water at room temperature up to half of the coup.
We let it rest a little bit, about 5 minutes.
On the other hand we have our hot water thermos, ready for action, waiting to be used.
We are going to notice that the yerba that is in our mate absorbs the water that we put in it and begins to swell. On the other side we see how the famous “mountain” of yerba is formed.
This is used to take care of the yerba to use later and turn the mate. You can read these tricks in depth in our article of how to serve the best mate. Another benefit it has is that it makes our mate have a richer, less bitter taste and we prevent it from remaining like a puddle and “lavarse”, which would make it lose its flavor faster. If these terms are driving you a little crazy you can enter to see our glosario matero to get familiar with some of the key terms to be an authentic expert.
Next we are going to repeat the water step but this time we are going to use the hot water that is waiting for us in the thermos. So, we grab the thermos and put the hot water on the same side where we had put the cold one, in the little hole. In this way the yerba continues swelling.
You may wonder
Why cold water is placed first and then hot?
Because this takes care of the dry yerba, by placing the water at room temperature we first prevent the yerba from burning and losing its essential taste and we also avoid the occasional burn in the mouth.
When the yerba has finished swelling after about 5 minutes, your mate is ready to place the bombilla. You are going to introduce it from the same side where we put the water, slowly covering the hole at the top of the bombilla with your thumb and pressing down.
Now that you have it set up, the next step is to serve it and enjoy a good mate!